Chinese auteur film director Lou Ye He shortened his visit to Xining and the First International Film Festivaland returned to Beijing as soon as his mentoring duties were over. But every time his name appeared at the festival, which ended on Saturday, he was met with cheers from the audience.
That’s because, for the young, aspiring filmmakers involved in First, Lou remains something of a hero.
Lou has earned respect not only for films like “Suzhou River,” “Spring Fever” and “Saturday Fiction,” which have all enjoyed international festival runs, or for the five-year filmmaking ban he received for defying Chinese censors with the romantic drama “Summer Palace.” It’s also because of his bold, unrelenting approach to social dynamics.
His latest work “An Unfinished Film,” which premiered at Cannes and could trigger another official reprimand, fit that mold, although it was conceived very differently.
In interviews at Cannes, Lou explained that the idea for the film was hatched in 2019, when he wanted to make something new out of unused footage from Lou’s previous works starring Qin Hao. (There are obvious parallels with another indie auteur, Jia Zhangke’s “Caught by the Tides,” which used footage from his two decades of filmmaking and also screened at Cannes this year.) But the COVID-19 pandemic forced Lou to reconstruct the entire project, shaping it instead as the story of a group of confined filmmakers trying to stay in touch with their estranged families.
In it, many scenes are representations of video calls between the characters and their families, and that was a problem.
“The movie screen is wide horizontally, while the phone screen is the opposite. You could say the phone screen format is ‘anti-movie,’” Lou said. “But the phone screen is the [dominant] The modern screen. How can we exclude the modern screen from our films? It is unthinkable.”
Instead of going with the “real life” method, where an entire movie is created on a computer, Lou opted to reconstruct real dialogue and have actors voice the lines. He says it was a challenge, but he thinks it worked in this case.
“[The phone screen] “It does not create a free and relaxed atmosphere, but rather a restrained and tense one. The quarantines and lockdowns that were carried out during the pandemic speak a very restrained language.”
Lou also confirmed that “An Unfinished Film” is not finished. Whether that means a remake or a sequel, Lou hasn’t said for now. Only that he will continue working on this “very personal project.”
He is also believed to be well advanced on another film, known as “Three Words” or “Re-TROS after Applause Nan Jing documentary.”