The Cinematheque

“Bi Gan’s most extravagant film to date … [He] exults in the medium’s capacity to traverse as well as transfigure space and time, and Resurrection takes this metaphysical impulse to grandiose extremes.”

Dennis Lim, Film Comment

Bi Gan opens his third and most ambitious feature with an intertitle: here spans a cinematic century, from silent dawn to final afterglow. Its dystopian premise—a world in which imagination is becoming extinct—will be realized by an allegorical dyad drawn from German expressionism, and unfold in chapters with the figures of the artist (Shu Qi) and her muse, a visionary dreamer (Jackson Yee), appearing in different form each time. In customary fashion for Bi, this wild mixture of modes—five stories in all, ranging from naive fairytale to confidence game, pure illusionism to Dionysian nighttime reverie—is an expansion of his project, which, despite the film’s suggestion of cinema’s end or collapse, gestures forward. Resurrection is another fractured mirror from Bi, with stunning feats of spectacle at each bookend, and curious shapeshifting tales in between.

In Mandarin with English subtitles

Prix Spécial
Cannes 2025

“An altogether stranger, more mercurial miracle than its predecessors [in Bi Gan’s filmography] … Resurrection is more than just another facile love letter to the medium.”

Justin Chang, The New Yorker

“Resurrection has to be seen to be believed … Bi Gan continues to ascend in both his imaginative and filmmaking capabilities.”

Hannah Strong, Little White Lies