Bi Gan Completes Fourth Feature Film and Receives Honorary Golden Lady Harimaguada

Chinese director Bi Gan announced the completion of his fourth feature, which he says will examine human existence, at the 25th Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival. He received the Honorary Golden Lady Harimaguada and a six-film retrospective, “Bi Gan Blues,” which also presented his selections of Feimu’s “Spring in a Small Town” and Jia Zhangke’s “The World.”

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Bi Gan’s debut short “The Poet and the Singer” (2012) led to the award-winning feature “Kaili Blues” (2015), which collected prizes at Locarno, the Golden Horse and the Three Continents Festival. His second feature “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (2018) screened in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard, and “Resurrection” (2022) earned Cannes’ Special Jury Prize.

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Bi Gan said the period after “Resurrection” revealed public “eagerness and anxiety toward AI,” noting a shift from “illusions of the past” to “mirrored reflections of new ones,” which he calls an “abnormality” causing a global “neurosis.” He plans to explore the human condition from a “more micro perspective” and likens his creative method to “picking stones of different shapes by the riverbank and throwing them casually into the current,” emphasizing instinct. He called the retrospective “a new start” that lets him feel “the ripples of history within my own river-like creativity.”

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The film situates Chinese auteur cinema at the crossroads of AI-driven societal anxiety and personal existential inquiry, influencing future cinematic approaches.

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• “After ‘Resurrection,’ I discovered that people around me are filled with both eagerness and anxiety toward AI. People are no longer trapped in the illusions of the past, but instead find themselves caught in the mirrored reflections of new ones,” — Bi Gan, Director

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• “From now on, I want to look into the human condition from a more micro perspective.” — Bi Gan, Director

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• “Stay humorous.” — Bi Gan, Director

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• “These two films offered me two different perspectives: inside and outside. ‘Spring in a Small Town’ introduced me to a way of looking inward, while ‘The World’ gave me perhaps the most complete representation of the external world that I have encountered.” — Bi Gan, Director

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• “As a creator, it is sometimes difficult to see my own position clearly. But the echoes within the festival, at Las Palmas, allow me to feel the ripples of history within my own river-like creativity, in silence and persistence.” — Bi Gan, Director

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The fourth feature will enter the festival circuit before a wider release; Bi Gan noted that motifs of dreams, time and space will remain “perpetual” in his future work.

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