Resurrection

Bi Gan made Long Day's Journey Into Night at twenty-nine and spent six years on the follow-up, a Chinese-French co-production that took a specially created award from the jury at Cannes in 2025 — a prize invented, essentially, because the film did not fit the existing categories.

The premise is a fable: in a future where people no longer dream, a being called the Fantasmer still does, and dreaming has been criminalised. Around this Bi Gan builds six chapters, each shot in the idiom of a different era of film — silent, noir, wartime melodrama, digital — culminating in the extended single take that has become his signature. Jackson Yee and Shu Qi lead a cast that changes shape from chapter to chapter.

Reviews out of Cannes were among the most excited of the festival, with a 4.07 Letterboxd average from 78,000 ratings and comparisons to Weerasethakul and Wong Kar-wai. It is a film about cinema made by someone who came to it late and from a small city in Guizhou, and its ambition is closer to a manifesto than to a plot. Demanding, and unlike anything else released this year.