The Cinematheque

“One of cinema’s most prodigious enchanters.”

Justin Chang, The New Yorker

A poet and a filmmaker, Bi Gan (b. 1989) has emerged as a director who excels at beguiling and confounding audiences and critics alike. His films are rooted in his home province of Guizhou, but wander through a landscape of dreams, literary adornment, and technical ambition. In one feature after another, Bi engages with a pantheon of cinematic gods that begins with Murnau, travels through Tarkovsky, and ends, perhaps, with himself and whatever extended long take he might have planned for his next feature.

Bi has become a star in this digital era of stunning spectacle, and those travelling shots (measuring 30, 40, and 60 minutes long) have made him the de facto figurehead of the generation of Chinese-language filmmakers—including Wei Shujun and the late Hu Bo—that followed the history-mounting one led by Jia Zhangke and Wang Bing. But it’s notable that none of his films are simply guided by a technical conceit. Bi’s films encompass a range of approaches to how time can be described. It is precisely the collision offered between each of these modes—of expository voiceovers, poetic texts, elliptical montage, and those breathtaking continuous takes—that creates a powerful pull to examine more closely how each narrative works.

Each of Bi Gan’s films have earned their share of praise, often in terms of singular, unrepeatable feats. The Cinematheque is excited to present these works together on the occasion of the release of his latest film Resurrection, with A Short Story playing in a Vancouver theatre for the first time, and rare and not-to-be-missed 3D screenings of Long Day’s Journey into Night. Consider this the ideal way to see the first chapter of one of contemporary cinema’s most inventive magicians.

“It’s astounding that at just 35 years old Bi Gan is operating at such a level of ambition and scale.”

Hannah Strong, Little White Lies

“Bi Gan’s art is something completely different … There is something uncanny, something quietly, modestly rapturous about Bi’s world: it’s seemingly grounded in a specific location, circumstance, and personality, while at the same time freely roaming, and not delimited by space, time, and character.”

Shelly Kraicer, Cinema Scope

apparent conviction that whole new realms of cinema are possible in making the immaterial material.”

Dennis Lim, Artforum