At a moment when China’s twentieth century is frequently revisited through epic reconstruction or geopolitical analysis, Bi Gan charts a different course. His recent film, Resurrection, travels through a hundred years of Chinese history using the grammar of global film movements, reimagining the nation’s past not as propaganda or policy debate but as a landscape of dreams, memory, and unresolved longing.
The profile description of Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan on Mubi carries a quote by him: “My movie is like a heavy rain, but there’s no need to bring umbrellas.” The experience of watching his new film, Resurrection, screened recently at the 30th International Film Festival of Kerala, is no different. In the spirit of his earlier dreamlike films, Kaili Blues (2015) and Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018), Bi Gan embarks on yet another visual storytelling adventure that invites the audience to a distant future where people have resolved the problem of death by abolishing dreams. In that world, those who surrender their ability to dream become “the Other Ones,” immortal beings untouched by time. Those who refuse are “Deliriants,” creatures of excess and disorder, hunted as threats to reality and history alike. And somewhere inside this speculative architecture, hidden like contraband, is cinema itself.