Chinese director Bi Gan, whose 2018 film “Long Day’s Journey into Night” played at Cannes, will next direct “Resurrection.” The ambitious sci-fi detective movie is to be headlined by Chinese superstar Jackson Yee (“Better Days”) and actor Shu Qi (“The Assassin”) who sits on this year’s Venice jury.
Boasting Bi’s edgy aesthetic and narrative style, the film tells the story of a woman whose consciousness falls into the “eternal time zone” during a surgical procedure. Trapped in many dreams, she finds an android corpse and tries to wake it up by telling endless stories. The android then wanders within her stories and its senses gradually awaken.
Charles Gillibert’s CG Cinema will again co-produce the project. Bi is finishing the script and plans to shoot later this year.
“Resurrection” will be lensed by Dong Jingsong, whose credits include “Long Day’s Journey into Night” and “The Wild Goose Lake.”
The topnotch key crew also includes production designer Tu Nan, whose credits include Chen Kaige’s “Legend of the Demon Cat” and Wong Kar-Wai’s “Blossoms Shanghai,” alongside Huang Wen-Ying, who has worked on many films by Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
Bi, who also has credits as a poet and a photographer, had a breakout debut feature with 2015’s “Kaili Blues.” (Kaili City is the town of Bi’s birth in Guizhou province.) It scooped prizes at the Golden Horse Awards, The Three Continents Festival in Nantes and the best first feature award at the Locarno festival. A noted stylist, Bi’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” contains an astonishing final 59-minute sequence consisting of a single shot in 3D.
His most recent work, the 15-minute “A Short Story” was last year picked up for North American distribution by Kino Lorber.