With his astounding debut Kaili Blues (2015) and the equally impressive 3D odyssey Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018), Chinese director Bi Gan emerged as one of the most promising new voices in cinema this last decade. Now he’s finally returning behind the camera for two new projects.
Bi Gan has completed shooting a new short titled Le cœur du soleil brisé (which is translated to The Broken Heart of the Sun), Hang Lu reports (via IONCINEMA), and one can see some snaps from the set below. Following financing news last spring, they also report that the director’s third feature will finally go into production this year.
While no details have been unveiled yet, Bi Gan did discuss his future in filmmaking, following the surprise box office of his previous film, which took in over $40 million in China courtesy a marketing campaign that led people to believe it was a romance. “Whether the film made money or not, it’s going to be very difficult for me to find investors for my next project,” he told Slant. “I make a very specific type of movie and I probably won’t be able to make a more commercial film now that people know who I am, and the vision I want to work with. It doesn’t translate to easy investment, and it doesn’t change the kinds of movies I want to make. I will not be making more linear or commercial films.”
“The way I imagine different scenes and how I’m going to connect them is always thinking about how I’m going to create a way to distort people’s anticipation of what it should be,” Bi Gan told us in 2019 upon the U.S. release of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. “For example, in the opening sequence, when I was writing it I was thinking about, ‘I want to create a story about two characters in passionate desire; in the midst of it or right after, this particular male character starts to think about another female character, so how am I going to create something like this?’ If I use a conventional way of doing that, I can just interject a flashback of the other female character into the narrative, but I didn’t want to do that because it’s not experimental, it’s not new, it’s not fresh.”