An Unfinished Film

West Coast Premiere

Official Selection, 2024 Cannes Film Festival

At the start of 2020, filmmaker Xiaorui and his old collaborators unearth a decade-old, unfinished project from their years as idealistic indie directors, hidden away on outdated computers but still beckoning their sense of adventure. They decide to answer the call, resuming where they left off only to unexpectedly run into the panic and heavy protocol of the early days of COVID-19. As crew members get sick and filmmakers frantically try to squeeze in the last minutes of their shoot before being forced into hotel quarantine, cast and crew struggle to maintain a sense of personal and creative control. As time passes, they realize that police brutality and isolation might take a more severe toll than the looming threat of the then little-known virus.

Renowned for his rebellious spirit, Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye returns to SDAFF (Blind Massage, 2014) with a unique work of docufiction about collective quarantine, an experience that still haunts many in Mainland China. Originally intending to create a new project based on deleted footage from his 2009 film, Spring Fever, Lou changed course when the pandemic hit, exploring a uniquely contemporary and pandemic-era narrative told through cell phones and vertical screens, an “anti-film” of sorts as much a rewrite of cinema as his breakthrough Suzhou River (2000).