Resurrection

A Chinese science fiction film. The world it builds is this: humanity has stopped dreaming. Imagination is an extinct faculty and only a few people resist that. A woman loses consciousness during surgery and falls outside time. She wanders inside an endless sequence of dreams and comes upon a body there. To wake it she begins to tell. She builds story upon story; each set in a different age and a different genre. The film is made of those stories. The sections imitate different periods of film history: one shot like a silent film, one like noir, one like a gangster picture. What the narrative is interested in is not event but memory: the same two figures reappear in every section, an artist and a dreamer, and their relationship takes another shape each time. The last section was shot as one long take; the director used the same method in his previous film and here it is extended further. Shu Qi and Jackson Yee take the leads; Yee plays more than one character across different eras, in different accents and dialects. Mark Chao is in the cast. Bi Gan directed, eight years after his previous feature. The film won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Who it is for: anyone who likes experiments in form, references to film history and slow cinema. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a story; the film scatters its plot on purpose and many sections are left unexplained.