Chinese director Lou Yi cut short his visit to Xining and the first international film festival, rushing back to Beijing as soon as his guiding duties were over. But every time his name was mentioned at the festival, which concluded Saturday, it drew cheers from the crowd.
The reason for this is that Lu remains a hero to aspiring young filmmakers of the kind who attend the festival.
Lu has earned his respect not only for films like “Suzhou River,” “Spring Fever” and “Saturday Fantasy,” which have been acclaimed at international festivals, or his five-year ban from filmmaking after he defied Chinese censors with his romantic drama “Summer Palace.” He has also earned his respect for his bold and relentless focus on social dynamics.
His latest, “Unfinished Film,” which premiered at Cannes and may draw another official rebuke, fits this mold—though it was conceived quite differently.
In interviews at Cannes, Lu explained that the idea for the film was conceived in 2019, when it was intended to create something new from unused footage from Lu’s previous work starring Chen Hao. (There are obvious parallels to independent director Jia Zhangke’s “Caught by the Tides,” which used footage from two decades of filmmaking and also screened at Cannes this year.) But the Covid-19 pandemic forced Lu to reconstruct the entire project, shaping it instead as the story of a group of locked-down filmmakers trying to stay in touch with the families they’ve been separated from.
In the movie, many scenes were video phone calls between the characters and their families. This was a problem.
“The movie screen is horizontally wide, while the phone screen is the opposite. You can say that the shape of the phone screen is ‘anti-movie,’” Lu said. “But the phone screen is [dominant] “The modern screen. How can we exclude the current screen from our films? It is unimaginable.”
Rather than resorting to a “screen life” approach, where an entire film is created inside a computer, Lu chose to reconstruct real dialogue and have actors sing the lines. It was a challenge, he says, but he believes he succeeded in this case.
“[The phone screen] “This does not create a free and comfortable environment, but rather a restricted and tense one. The quarantine and lockdown that occurred during the pandemic, they all speak a very restrictive language.”
Law also confirmed that the film “Unfinished Movie” is not yet complete. Law has not yet stated whether that means a remake or a sequel to the film. He only said that he will continue working on this “very personal project.”
He is also understood to be in the advanced stages of filming another movie, known either as “Three Words” or “Re-TROS Documentary After Nan Jing's Applause”.
