AN UNFINISHED FILM
Directed by LOU Ye | 2024 | 106 mins | Germany, Singapore | M | In Chinese and English with English subtitles
Awards & Festivals
2024 Cannes Film Festival
2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam
2024 Toronto International Film Festival
Winner of Best Director, Best Narrative Feature and Best Editing at the 2024 Golden Horse Awards. An Unfinished Film is a striking piece of (very) modern history, mixing fiction and real footage from social media, putting China’s response to Covid in perfectly distilled focus in the process.
Covid may have passed (hopefully), but the pandemic has left permanent marks on all of us. Surprisingly, filmmakers have largely opted to move on and leave the coronavirus in the rearview, happy to watch it get smaller and smaller until it disappears completely.
Shanghai director Lou Ye, however, is ready to face it head-on with his new drama An Unfinished Film, which is set in January 2020, back when the world was going mad. The film follows a film crew that reunites near Wuhan to resume the shooting of a film halted ten years earlier, only to be thrown into turmoil as cities are placed under lockdown. The crew continues to communicate via video calls whilst the quarantined lead actor Jiang Cheng (Hao Qin) struggles to support his locked-down wife and one-month-old baby in Beijing.
SCREENING WITH SHORT FILM:
TOO MANY ETHNICS
Directed by Vonne Patiag | 2023 | 9 mins | Australia | UNCL 15+
The epic quest of three best friends surviving trials of racism, love and friendship in the long line to get into an exclusive nightclub.
