Long Day’s Journey Into Night

This ambitious and visually dazzling feature has set an impressive box office record for arthouse film in China. The experience of watching it has been compared to that of dreaming with one's eyes open, which speaks to director Bi Gan's ability to merge past and present, imagination and action, and to alternate between realism and visual poetry. On the surface, the film is a detective story. It follows Luo Hongwu, a former criminal who returns to his hometown Kaili in Southern China, searching for his former lover Wan Quiwen, only to be haunted by painful memories of the past.

Bi Gan (b. 1989) is a director, screenwriter, photographer, and poet. He decided to become a filmmaker after having watched Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker as a teenager, and he directed his first short film in 2010. Bi Gan won acclaim and many awards for his first feature film Kaili Blues (2015), which like Long Day's Journey Into Night is set to his home town Kaili in the Guizhou province.