RESURRECTION

PROGRAM NOTES

Cinema Sanctuary returns after a two-year hiatus with a filmgoing experience like no other. Bi Gan’s epic film Resurrection is a love letter to a century of cinema, following a mysterious shape-shifting protagonist through a dreamlike journey across history and states of consciousness. Unfolding in a series of genres from silent cinema and noir to science fiction, romance and the gangster film, Resurrection continually reinvents itself in each new chapter, culminating in an extraordinary extended sequence unfolding in real time. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, Gan's third feature film is an engrossing epic that celebrates cinema’s unique ability to expand time and renew a creative sense of what's possible.

In a world where humanity has lost the ability to dream, a mysterious figure inhabits images and illusions that others can no longer perceive. Bi Gan moves us through different cinematic forms and eras, making a film as much about the history and possibilities of cinema as the story unfolding inside it.

Bi Gan is a radically personal filmmaker working inside the enormous commercial cinema culture of China, using increasingly large resources without surrendering the idiosyncrasy of his work. He is an arthouse filmmaker in the lineage of Tarkovsky (seeing STALKER changed his understanding of what cinema could be) as well as Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wong Kar-wai.

His first feature / KAILI BLUES / was released in 2015 and was largely assembled with money from friends, professors, and teachers. Set in his native Guizhou, it blurs the boundaries between childhood memory and imagination. Its celebrated 41 minute extended take announced a filmmaker interested less in conventional plot than in how time, movement, and intricately orchestrated action can be felt.

With LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT / he pushed those ideas further. A man returns to Kaili searching for a mysterious woman from his past, and the film gradually crosses from noir and fragmented memory into a sustained dream state, culminating in its famous hour-long 3D sequence (one uncut shot through multiple locations, sets, characters).

Seven years later comes ʀᴇꜱᴜʀʀᴇᴄᴛɪᴏɴ / his most expansive film yet. Drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as Buster Keaton and Mark Rothko, the film is Gan’s attempt to gather more than a century of cinematic language into a single work (silent cinema, noir, melodrama, science fiction, action, romance) and then use those forms not as quotation, but as gateways into different states of consciousness.

It feels at once like a summation of everything he has been exploring since his first feature and a leap into something much larger // a film about the mysteries of the subconscious and what cinema can still become.

Cinema Sanctuary is a film initiative devoted to cinema as a shared space for reflection, inquiry, and encounter. We present films from around the world that explore spiritual experience, existential crisis, and encounters with the sacred. Treating cinema not simply as entertainment but as a communal, contemplative practice, we invite audiences to slow down, sit with complexity, and experience films collectively.

RELEASE DATE

May 22, 2025 (Cannes premiere)

PRODUCTION

Huace Pictures / Dangmai Films / CG Cinéma / Arte France Cinéma / Obluda Films

WRITERS

Bi Gan / Zhai Xiaohui

DIRECTOR

Bi Gan

CAST

Jackson Yee / Shu Qi / Mark Chao / Li Gengxi / Huang Jue / Chen Yongzhong

LAURELS

Special Prize — 2025 Cannes Film Festival

DIRECTOR FILMOGRAPHY

South, 2010 / Tiger, 2011 / Diamond Sutra, 2012 / Kaili Blues, 2015 / Secret Goldfish, 2016 / Long Day’s Journey into Night, 2018 / A Short Story, 2022 / Resurrection, 2025

FURTHER READING

Bi Gan on Resurrection — The Film Stage