Earlier this year, Lou Ye’s An Unfinished Film was distributed by MINT Chinese Film Festival CIC across UK cinemas. We would like to congratulate Shirley Lin, Co-Founder of MINT who was part of our Future Talent Programme 2022-2021 cohort on her distribution success.
★★★★☆ 4/5
An Unfinished Film marks Lou Ye’s return to the international stage and serves as a culmination of his decades-long career. Co-written with his long-time collaborator and wife, Yingli Ma, the film had its world premiere on 16 May 2024 in the Special Screenings section at the Cannes Film Festival.
Following its warm reception in Europe, it went on to win both Best Narrative Feature and Best Director at the 61st Golden Horse Awards. This was Lou’s second time receiving the top feature prize since Blind Massage in 2014. In May 2025, An Unfinished Film was distributed across the UK by MINT Chinese Film Festival, drawing significant attention from both Chinese and international audiences.
As a docufiction, An Unfinished Film blurs the boundary between documentary and narrative fiction, capturing a fictional story with unsettling realism. Set during the outbreak of COVID-19 in early 2020, it follows a film crew that reconvenes in Wuhan to resume shooting a project halted ten years earlier, only to be caught in a sudden and indefinite lockdown.
What makes this film particularly arresting is its engagement with a historical trauma we have all lived through. For Chinese audiences in particular, who experienced the intense and even claustrophobic dimensions of pandemic control, the film resonates with collective memory in a certain period. In a way, the act of watching becomes retrospective recognition—a posteriori understanding that positions the viewer in a Derridean hauntological space, where the spectres of past crises surface through the present screen.
Lou leverages critical fabulation to archive this temporal rupture, capturing how the quarantine created a suspended dimension of time, neither flowing nor static, but a permanent vortex outside the normative structure of historical progression.
Within this suspended temporality, the film crew becomes what Giorgio Agamben might call “Homo Sacer”: figures caught in legal limbo, excluded from the law yet still subject to it. If Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides (2024) renders the flâneur’s body as a drifting and positive gesture, then An Unfinished Film offers the confined body as a site of resistance, emerging from overt protest to gentle opposition. Passive as it may be, a quieter but no less potent form of ideological dissent is revealed through the silence and struggle of the characters.
Notably, Lou Ye keenly captures the spectre of the epidemic and portrays it through specific apparatus, transforming it into a carrier of record and a symbol of resistance. Especially, the mobile phone plays a crucial role throughout the film, even replacing the traditional position of montage.
It serves as a revolutionary movement for Lou to integrate short and vertically framed videos like screen recordings, video calls, and low-resolution vlogs for the first time, which disrupts the imagery performance entailed by cinematographic montage. However, instead of simply employing these materials, he seeks their inherent commonalities and endows them with unique expressions by means of montage editing. These “imperfect” images, marked by dropped frames, buffering glitches, and temporal dissonance, expose a rupture in the brutal linearity of contemporary time as if the universe momentarily collapses under the weight of the most fragile human emotions.
In the latter part of the film, Lou even relinquishes his role as auteur, allowing the film’s structure to dissolve into collective voices and gestures. This radical act hints at a form of filmic communism, as I suggested, where authorship is diffused and the ownership of cinema is returned to his people. One particularly poignant moment involves a Douyin video shot by a young woman, in which the cars on the empty street whistle for three minutes long spontaneously on Tomb-sweeping Day, to mourn the dead of the pandemic. Such an abrupt insertion, far from undermining the status of traditional cinema, reclaims a redemptive authorship in today’s fractured digital life.
Furthermore, this approach invites comparison to Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023), which also deploys short-form media in its storytelling. Nevertheless, where Jude’s film reconstructs coherence through a monumental 30-minute-long take, Lou embraces fragmentation by acknowledging its presence and even amplifying its significance. Methodologically, one may see a cultural divergence between East and West in post-pandemic cinematic language—while the West regards short videos as an entertaining form that leads to temporal disruption, the East treats it as a way to salvage memory when fractures surface the time lineage.
Thereupon, the epidemic lockdown, imposed amidst the rampant spread of the virus, engenders a state of virtual temporality. What comes subsequently is not Plato’s allegorical cave of illusion and deferred truth, but a surreal and festive rave. The mischievous spirit of Dionysus traverses cyberspace and descends into the pixel—the fundamental unit of the image—scattered across countless colourful video chat boxes on the screen.
Carried by a tragic consciousness, the viewers find no exit from these absurd images. Instead, they are ensnared within the single-frequency, brainwashing refrain of The Fiery-Red Sarilang. Out of this looping melody, the parody of the schizophrenic subject is invoked: dissociated, repetitive, and caught between spectacle and reality.
It is at this moment that the viewers realise the unfinished film finishes itself—not with closure, but by drawing the audience into the frame, inviting them to witness the history we have all endured and to complete it with their own threads of resonance and empathy.
In the end, An Unfinished Film reminds us that it is not cinema that shapes people, but people who shape cinema. Through haunting imagery, fractured footage, and suspended temporality, Lou Ye offers not only an urgent response to the catastrophe of the pandemic, but also a profound meditation on autonomy, individuality, and subjectivity within contemporary Chinese society.
An Unfinished Filmgrossed £31,852 in its opening weekend on May 16, 2025 in the UK, according to Box Office Mojo.
