Displaying items by tag: An Unfinished Film movie

AN UNFINISHED FILM

Singapore/Germany, 2024, 107 minutes, Colour.

Hao Qin Xiaorui Mao, Xi Qi.

Directed by Ye Lou.

Several commentators have referred to this film as “Docufiction”. There is the framework of a fiction story but, eventually, there is documentary footage incorporated into this story.

Audiences will have their memories of their Covid experience, especially in 2020. Audiences watching this film will be remembering, comparing their experiences, especially of lockdown, with what they are watching on the screen. Those who do not want to watch and remember their own experiences, An Unfinished Film is not for them.

While this is a Chinese film, screening in China itself has been forbidden. The producers are from Germany and Singapore.

The film opens with a film group arriving in a Chinese city in 2019, gathering together after 10 years with the idea of completing a film that was unfinished 10 years earlier. There is the director, the main actor, quite a number of the crew. There is a discussion as to why one would make a film, or continue to make a film when they know that it will never have release. We see clips from the unfinished film (actual clips from films of the writer/director, Ye Lou, and films made with the main actor here). So, what seems to be a film about making a film, is suddenly interrupted.

The setting here is not far from Wuhan. It is mid-January 2020, in the weeks prior to the Chinese New Year. While many people from other parts of the world continue their ordinary lives in January even to mid-March, the alarm was early in China, the spreading of the epidemic, the closing down of much activity, the lockdown and its physical and emotional consequences.

Which means that the latter part of the film is very much the drama of the lockdown, initial denial, fighting, locked doors of hotels, confinement to rooms, security guards, and the various participants not able to meet each other, relying on phones, video material. There is the emotional story of the main actor and phone contact with his wife, concerned for their newborn baby. But, much of the film is of looking out the window, the empty streets, ambulances, the experience of isolation.

However, there is an exuberant collage of the whole troupe singing a song to celebrate the New Year, dancing and enthusiasm.

As the film becomes more documentary, there is information about Wuhan, the doctor who revealed the epidemic, his death, the response of the authorities, further crackdowns, then the release – and some postscripts about further government interventions during outbreaks in the following years.

So, memories of Covid, interest in this narrative, audiences checking their covert experiences – and the film for audiences in years to come to indicate that to them what the Covid epidemic experience was like.