Zi

Official Selection, 2026 Sundance Film Festival
Official Selection, 2026 Busan International Film Festival

Played by Michelle Mao, the titular Zi nervously awaits the results of a neurology exam. In a state of anticipation and fear, she wanders the streets of Hong Kong. Between sickness and health, freedom and being prisoner to one’s body, she starts having visions of what might be her future self. Like a moonbeam in the night arrives the enigmatic Elle (Haley Lu Richardson), an American expat who is both alien presence but also oddly familiar–perhaps from Zi’s visions of the future. Shadowing them is a third figure (played by Jin Ha), stalking them in the night, and who may be able to unlock their uncanny emotional and neurological bind.

The latest film by Kogonada (After Yang), ZI is like seeing through a mystery portal, where the acts of looking and hearing induce dissociation with self and other in an urban terrain as alienating as it is enchanting. Impulsively and surreptitiously filmed in the streets of Hong Kong, ZI is a creative and spiritual recalibration for a filmmaker who has since Columbus (SDAFF ’17) ventured into larger and larger Hollywood productions. Working instead with a skeleton crew, he channels the Hong Kong and French New Waves (Wong Kar-wai, Agnès Varda, and Chris Marker the obvious beacons), and explores cityscapes with the precision of a director who once made a drama about architecture and came to fame with essay films on the transient spaces of Yasujiro Ozu.

– Brian Hu