Resurrection
(狂野时代)
Bi Gan
In this bleak silent-film world, people have sacrificed their dreams in exchange for eternal life. An agent searches for a “deliriant”, who is one of the last dreamers. In the basement of an opium den she finds this pitiful creature and grants him one last, intense dream – like a star that expires in a supernova.
The screen flickers, tears and goes up in flames. A free fall through various stages of the history of film begins. Set against lavishly staged panoramas and with love for visual and technical special effects of 20th-century cinema, the visual language – above all else – aims to do one thing: amaze the audience.
Following the worldwide success of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, master director Bi Gan is aiming even higher and through his kaleidoscope of stories, colours and emotions paints an utterly unique vison of cinema as a place where we can dream collectively.
3 May 2026
16:30 h, Esplanade im Festivalzentrum
More information
| Direction | Bi Gan |
| Country | China, France |
| Production year | 2025 |
| Duration | 159 min |
| Language | Chinese, Mandarin |
| Language Version | OV with German Subs |
| Genre | Drama, Science-Fiction, Fantasy |
| Production | Bi Gan, Charles Gillibert, Yang Lele |
| Production company | Huace Pictures, Dangmai Films (Shanghai), CG Cinéma |
| Co-production | Olivier Père, Guang Ren, Kaustubh Singh |
| Distribution | Plaion Pictures |
| Cast | Jackson Yee, Shu Qi, Mark Chao |
| Director of Photography | Jingsong Dong |
| Script | Bi Gan, Zhai Xiaohui |
| Montage | Xue Bai, Bi Gan |
| Sound | Li Danfeng, Emmanuel Croset |
| Music | M83 |
| Sound Design | Romain Anklewicz |
| Scenography | Qiang Liu |
CANNES 2025: SPECIAL AWARD OF THE JURY, BUSAN 2025: AWARD FOR ARTISTIC CONTRIBUTION
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About the director
Bi Gan is a Miao-Chinese filmmaker and poet from Kaili. He studied television directing at the Radio, Film, and Television Cadre College in Taiyuan, Shanxi. He first gained notable attention with his debut feature film Kaili Blues (2015), winning Best Emerging Director at the 68th Locarno Film Festival. His second feature Long Day's Journey into Night (2018) premiered at the 71st Cannes Film Festival in the section Un Certain Regard. Resurrection (2025), his latest work, competed for the Palme d'Or at the 78th Cannes Film Festival and won a Special Award.
Press reviews
"Bi Gan’s new movie is bold and ambitious, visually amazing, trippy and woozy in its embrace of hallucination and the heightened meaning of the unreal and the dreamlike. [...] It is a deeply mysterious film whose enigma extends to the title – is what is happening “resurrection” in any clear transformative sense? Or is it just a continuous flickering shape-shifting: the [deliriant] just a pulsating star on the far-reaches of the universe, that might in a few hundred thousand years explode or collapse in on itself?" (Peter Bradshaw for The Guardian)
"A marvelously maximalist movie of opulent ambition that is actually five or six movies, each at once playful and peculiar and part of an overarchingly melancholy elegy for the dream of 20th-century cinema and the lives we lived within it. [...] for those who miss the way the movies used to act on us, it is a reminder of the uniquely paradoxical pleasures of immersion and surrender: a dazzlingly cineliterate lesson in the lost art of letting go." (Jessica Kiang for Variety)
International Feature Film Program
