With his astounding debut Kaili Blues (2015) and the equally impressive 3D odyssey Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018), Chinese director Bi Gan emerged as one of the most promising new voices in cinema this last decade. Now he’s finally returning behind the camera with a new feature.
Later this year, Bi Gan will embark on the production of his third film Resurrection, Variety reports. Set to star Jackson Yee and Shu Qi, the project is described as an “ambitious sci-fi detective movie” tha follows a woman whose consciousness falls into the “eternal time zone” during a surgical procedure. “Trapped in many dreams, she finds an android corpse and tries to wake it up by telling endless stories. The android then wanders within her stories and its senses gradually awaken,” the synopsis reads.
Backed by Charles Gillibert’s CG Cinema, the crew includes cinematographer Dong Jingsong (Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Wild Goose Lake), production designers Tu Nan (Wong Kar-Wai’s forthcoming Blossoms Shanghai) and Huang Wen-Ying, a frequent collaborator of Hou Hsiao-hsien.
See the first teaser image from the film below.
“The way I imagine different scenes and how I’m going to connect them is always thinking about how I’m going to create a way to distort people’s anticipation of what it should be,” Bi Gan told us in 2019 upon the U.S. release of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. “For example, in the opening sequence, when I was writing it I was thinking about, ‘I want to create a story about two characters in passionate desire; in the midst of it or right after, this particular male character starts to think about another female character, so how am I going to create something like this?’ If I use a conventional way of doing that, I can just interject a flashback of the other female character into the narrative, but I didn’t want to do that because it’s not experimental, it’s not new, it’s not fresh.”