With A Winter Mirage circulating across European festival contexts, Kuo Li has gradually come into view—not through visibility alone, but through the specificity of her position as a creative producer working closely within the fabric of the film.

Rather than foregrounding narrative, the work unfolds through duration and observation. Set in Yiwu—the world’s largest hubs for small commodity trade—the film follows a single mother across the course of a winter solstice day. Within this temporal frame, family memory, migration, and an evolving urban landscape begin to surface. The film does not construct drama; it allows experience to accumulate, and meaning to emerge through presence.

Amanda: How do you understand the role of “creative producer”?

Kuo Li:
I don’t separate producing from the creative process. For me, it begins at the earliest stage—before form is fixed—when the question is still: Why does this story matter? How can I feasibly realise it?

That means moving across different layers of the film. Sometimes it’s structural. Sometimes spatial. Sometimes it involves performance, or simply how a process is held together.

On this project, especially working with long takes, everything needed to align with precision. But alignment is never given—it has to be negotiated constantly. My role is to hold that tension: toeing the line between intention and limitation, between what is imagined and what conditions allow.

Amanda: How would you describe your collaboration with the director?

Kuo Li:
A friend once asked Guoju how we manage to work together so smoothly. He said we “hardly talk.” That’s not entirely untrue.

I tend to understand what he is trying to do quite quickly. A Winter Mirage comes from his mother’s experience. It’s very personal, but it also carries something beyond the individual. When I first read the script, I felt I already understood it. Meeting his mother later only confirmed that intuition.

After the shoot, she told me the film wouldn’t have been possible without me. But filmmaking is never an individual endeavour. We’ve worked together since our first term in London. That continuity matters—it shapes how we think, and how we work without needing to articulate everything.

Amanda: You also work as a director. What led you to directing, and how do you navigate both roles?

Kuo Li:
I first stepped onto a film set when I was thirteen. I remember sitting next to a well-known Chinese director. During a break, someone asked me about an instrument. I said it was an erhu （二胡）. He corrected me—it was a jinghu （京胡）—and explained the difference.

It was a moment, but it stayed with me. I think I wanted to become someone like that, even if I didn’t fully understand what that meant at the time.

Later, working as a producer allowed me to see filmmaking from multiple positions. That perspective is useful. But directing requires something else—accepting that not everything can be controlled.

Amanda: What challenges did long-take shooting bring to the production, and how did it shape your approach to space?

Kuo Li:
We filmed across four cities in Zhejiang, using around 25 real locations, and completed the entire shoot in seven days.

Long takes demand precision, but they unfold in unstable conditions. Once a shot begins, it cannot be interrupted. Performance, camera, and environment all have to operate within the same continuous structure. But reality doesn’t stabilise itself for the camera—so a large part of the work becomes responding in real time, without breaking that structure.

This directly affected how we approached space.

The director constructed what I would describe as “liminal” urban environments—empty wholesale markets, underground parking garages, petrol stations, automated car washes, highways in the rain. These are transitional spaces, not destinations.

They are not just backgrounds. They produce a certain psychological condition. Through duration and continuity, the viewer is placed inside the character’s state—her isolation, her pressure, her displacement—almost in real time.

One of the most complex sequences was a temple fair staged on a temporary opera platform. It involved large crowds, and conditions that were difficult to predict or control. On the day of the shoot, we encountered the first heavy snowfall in Zhejiang in twelve years. Even the day before, I was still coordinating with local authorities and multiple parties to ensure that we could proceed with shooting the scene.

In UK industry screenings, several professionals noted that the scale and complexity of the production effectively placed it within the realm of feature filmmaking.

Amanda: Why did you choose opera performers rather than trained film actors?

Kuo Li:
We initially worked with professional screen actors, but something didn’t fully align.

Opera performers have a different relationship to the body. Their control, their rhythm, their awareness of space—it’s very precise. That becomes extremely valuable in long-take filmmaking.

Film acting and opera are fundamentally different, but here, that difference became productive.

Xiaofeng Chen carried several demanding long takes. The role of her father was played by a 90-year-old performer, whose restrained presence shaped the emotional tone of the ending.

Amanda: How has the film’s movement across festivals shaped its reception?

Kuo Li:
The material could initially exist as a 40-minute version. But mid-length categories are quite limited in festival programming, so during post-production we made the decision to shorten it, enabling access to more short film competitions.

That said, it was accepted into the mid-length competition at Riga IFF 2ANNAS. So it exists somewhere between formats—and that ambiguity has influenced how it circulates and its positive reception.

The film premiered at the Carthage Film Festival and then moved through several European competitions—in France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, and Sweden.

It was also presented at the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Market. That platform was important. Many programmers first encountered the film there, which led to further invitations.

In parallel, it was shown on Festival Scope and invited to Visions du Réel. Both the director and I were also selected for the British Council Talent Programme.

The project reached the final selection stage of La Cinef at Cannes.

For me, moving across different European frameworks has allowed the film to build a more sustained kind of visibility.

Kuo Li:
The screening in Riga was very well received. After the screening, filmmakers from different countries came to speak with me and expressed their appreciation, particularly for the film’s pacing and use of space. The audience response was also very warm, with strong applause at the end. That kind of cross-cultural resonance was especially meaningful to me.

Amanda: As a director, why did you choose a child’s perspective in your film Summer?

Kuo Li:
Childhood is difficult to access from within. It feels continuous. Only later does it become something you can reflect on.

Summer follows a Chinese-British brother and sister in the UK. At its centre, there is a very small conflict—an ice cream. But within that, I’m interested in how emotional structures form inside a cross-cultural family.

Children don’t explain emotions. They experience them. I wanted to stay close to that state, rather than defining it.

Formally, I used shifting aspect ratios—from 16:9 to 1:1. It’s a way of compressing space, but also emotion. It relates to how memory works—how something expansive becomes contained, and reconfigured.

Amanda: What does working between China and the UK bring to your practice? How do you expect this transnational experience to shape your vision as a director in the future?

Kuo Li:
It’s not about moving between two fixed systems. It’s about working across them and adapting continuously.

One context shapes how I see the other. China often emphasises structure and continuity. The UK allows more openness in the process. Between them, there is a space that isn’t fixed—and that space is where I tend to work.

That in-between space also informs where the work is going.

My practice as a director is ongoing, and Summer is now entering the festival circuit. At the same time, Guoju and I are developing new projects—feature films, as well as documentary series. We want to continue exploring the relationship between spatial structures and lived experience.

Amanda: Looking back, what do you think A Winter Mirage successfully achieved, and what do you think could be improved?

Kuo Li:
The film moves between reality and illusion—the idea of a “golden age,” and the image of a mirage.

It works through real time, real space, real bodies. It captures one ordinary day, but also something larger—changes that are harder to name directly.

Every decision affects everyone else. What made this possible was not one person, but a shared commitment across the whole process. 

Amanda: Do you feel that your vision as a director is impacted by censorship laws in China?

Kuo Li:
At this stage, I feel that the impact is relatively limited. This is mainly because I am currently focusing on children’s stories and themes related to Chinese and British cultural contexts, which are generally more accessible within the existing framework.

However, I am also aware that if I expand into different subject matters in the future, this environment will inevitably have some influence on my work. For example, I previously wrote a script based on a real moment I witnessed in my hometown. It tells the story of a long-term homeless elder who begs inside a KFC, and a female street vendor, and how a moment of mutual support develops between them. The story touches on aspects of urban management and more grounded social realities. I submitted this project to several development platforms in China, but did not receive further feedback, which I believe may be related to the nature of the subject and how it is expressed.

If the opportunity arises, I would still very much like to make this film. As a short film, it offers more flexibility in both production and presentation, and may be less constrained.

At the same time, I also see this as something that pushes me to think more carefully about what constitutes an effective form of expression within given conditions. For me, it is an ongoing process of adjustment and finding an appropriate creative language, rather than simply a restriction.

For me, working across different cultural contexts is therefore important. I hope to continue developing projects both in China and in the UK, and to find ways of expressing different kinds of stories within different environments.

Amanda: Do you have any advice for aspiring filmmakers looking to work across borders, in transnational cinema?

Kuo Li:
Working in China presents many challenges, often across multiple levels, and it is difficult to point to a single example. The industry tends to operate within a relationship-based context, and particularly for producers, if this aspect is not well managed, certain processes can become quite difficult. In contrast, while relationships are also important in the UK, many issues can be addressed more directly through established systems and structures.

For this reason, I often feel that if one can become a capable producer in China, they are likely to be able to navigate other working environments with greater ease all around the world.

As a director, one of the main challenges in the UK is language. Directing requires the ability to communicate very precise and nuanced performance directions, but sometimes what can be conveyed remains more intuitive than verbal. Even some Chinese directors with a strong command of English encounter this difficulty. At the same time, this has pushed me to develop more effective ways of communicating, something I have also explored through studying acting in the UK.

In terms of cultural differences, I think they do exist, but not always in an obvious way. People often describe British communication as implicit, but in my view, Chinese communication can be even more implicit—it is simply expressed differently, which leads to distinct communication logics.

From a creative perspective, I tend to summarise this difference with the words: “a sense of play.” Many creative processes are essentially exploratory—they emerge through a kind of play.

However, compared to many in the West, people of my generation in China have often gone through a more structured and disciplined education, and we tend to approach creation in a more serious way.

This is not necessarily a negative thing, but it can create a certain pressure. And when creativity carries too much pressure, it can move away from its original intuition. This is something I have genuinely experienced in my own practice.

So in a way, my time in the UK has also been a process of relearning how to “play.”