Chinese auteur director Lou Ye kept short his visit to Xining and the First International Film Festival, scuttling back to Beijing as soon as his mentorship duties were completed. But whenever his name was displayed at the festival, which wrapped on Saturday, it drew cheers from audiences.
That’s because, for young and aspiring filmmakers of the kind participating at First, Lou remains something of a hero.
Lou has earned respect not just from films such as “Suzhou River,” “Spring Fever” and “Saturday Fiction” which have had international festival careers, or the five-year ban from filmmaking that he picked up by defying China’s censors with romantic drama “Summer Palace.” It also comes from his audacious and relentless focus on social dynamics.
His latest work “An Unfinished Film,” which premiered at Cannes and may trigger another official reprimand, fitted that mold – though it was conceived very differently.
In interviews conducted in Cannes, Lou explained that the idea for the film was elaborated in 2019, when it was intended to make something new out of the unused footage of Lou’s previous works which starred Qin Hao. (There is an obvious parallel with another indie auteur, Jia Zhangke’s “Caught by the Tides” which used footage from his two decades of moviemaking and also showed in Cannes this year.) But the COVID-19 pandemic forced Lou to reconstruct the whole project, shaping it instead as the story of a group of locked-down filmmakers trying to keep in touch with their families from whom they had been separated.
In it, many scenes are depictions of the video phone calls between the characters and their families. And that was a problem.
“The film screen is horizontally wide, while the phone’s screen is the opposite. You could say that the phone screen’s format is ‘anti-film’,” said Lou. “But the phone screen is the [dominant] modern screen. How can we exclude today’s screen from our movies? It unthinkable.”
Rather than going for the “screenlife” approach, where an entire film is created within a computer, Lou chose to reconstruct real dialog and have actors to voice the lines. He says it was challenging, but he believes that it worked in this case.
“[The phone screen] doesn’t make for a free and relaxing environment, but rather a restrained and tense one. The quarantines and lock-downs that took place during the pandemic, they all speak a very restrained language.”
Lou also confirmed that “An Unfinished Film” is indeed not completed. Whether that means a recut or a sequel, Lou is not saying for now. Only that he will continue to work on this “very personal project.”
He is also understood to be well advanced on another movie, known either as “Three Words” or “Re-TROS After the Applause Nan Jing Documentary.”
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