We continue our spotlight on some of our favorite filmmakers in competition at this year’s edition of the Festival de Cannes with Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues. An audacious road movie that earned multiple awards after its debut at the 2015 Locarno Film Festival, Kaili Blues stands out as one of the more remarkable films from a new director in the past decade. While Bi continues to build upon his singular cinematic language — we’re quite excited about his new sci-fi detective film Resurrection — his command of the film form was present from the start, as seen in this dreamy sojourn through the Guizhou province in China.

Kaili Blues follows a country doctor, played by Bi’s uncle Cheng Yongzhong, who is searching for his lost nephew in the Chinese countryside. Bi has described the film as being about “the gloomy days of Kaili,” the county in southwest China where he grew up and still resides. He’s always been interested in the region’s “spirits and atmosphere,” so Kaili Blues naturally melds his family’s stories with local myths to create a vivid portrait of the place he calls home.

“Kaili Blues may seem scruffy, or gritty, or raw—it has a kind of coarse texture to it. Say someone’s coming to my home, and I’m serving wine in a homemade clay cup. That cup may not be high quality, but it’s clean, and the wine is good.” BI GAN

Both Kaili Blues and Bi’s follow-up, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, feature impressive long-takes; 41-minutes and 59-minutes, respectively. While these hypnotic sequences appear almost otherworldly in design, their origins couldn’t be more mundane. According to Bi, he first realized shooting long takes could be “very dreamy and liberating” when he was hired to film wedding videos with his collaborator Liang Kai (also the sound-designer on Kaili Blues). Their unique wedding videos, in which they followed the bride and groom from table-to-table over the course of an entire evening, were so well-received in Kaili that Bi was nicknamed the “Prince of the Wedding Ceremony.”

Bi Gan is a self-taught Chinese filmmaker from Kaili City, China. He started off as a poet and said he first became acquainted with the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, and Wim Wenders in college because he’d rarely attend his classes. Kaili Blues was his breakout film, earning him multiple awards at the Locarno Film Festival in 2015. His follow-up, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, premiered at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival in Un Certain Regard. Now, he is in the main competition at Cannes with Resurrection, a sci-fi film about a woman whose consciousness falls into an eternal time zone.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Special thanks to Ryan Krivoshey.