An Unfinished Film

In January 2020, the year the world came to a halt, a film crew infiltrated what was the epicenter of the world, for weeks and months, to resume the shooting and production of a film that had been unfinished ten years earlier. There, they would experience the unexpected events and challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic had in store for us. They would have to endure the lockdown far from their homes.

Loy Ye presented his most profound work at the Cannes Film Festival. With Qin Hao as the star of the film, as his cinema usually does, the feature film aims to capture and transport us the uncertainty that must have been felt during those days of shooting, which were just the beginning of a pandemic that no one can forget. A curious ode to cinema, it seeks to encapsulate the chaos and fear experienced in those early days when little was known about the future and this disease.

To achieve this, the film uses archival footage such as news reports, amateur videos, and images from mobile phones or low-quality cameras, while infusing a sense of romanticism and poetry into the feeling of saturation and misinformation that was experienced during those hours and days, when it seemed that life as we knew it was about to end.