An Unfinished Film

In January 2020 a film crew gathers near Wuhan to finish a shoot abandoned ten years earlier. Then the city closes and everyone is stranded in a hotel. Lou Ye builds the film in layers. On screen there is phone footage, CCTV, news bulletins and real material shot during quarantine, and to this he adds offcuts and on-set footage from his own earlier films, Suzhou River, Spring Fever, Mystery and The Shadow Play. The boundary between fiction and record is deliberately left unclear. Its actual subject is not the epidemic but recording itself: the tension between a camera filming an event and a system forbidding it. It was shot in China and presented at Cannes as a Singaporean and German co-production. It screened out of competition at Cannes in 2024. It won Best Film and Best Director at the Golden Horse Awards and the audience prize at the Singapore film festival. Who it is for: viewers who value formally daring hybrids of documentary and fiction. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a straight narrative, or unwilling to return to the days of the pandemic.