An Unfinished Film

When the pandemic confines Lou Ye and his crew to their hotel near Wuhan, their film grows into a gripping record of creative process in times of crisis. Liberally mixing fact and fiction, An Unfinished Film traces a recalcitrant film intent on evading its maker.

What happens when a film starts eating itself? In 2019, Lou Ye set out with his usual collaborators to complete an unfinished feature from ten years before. But when Covid-19 confined the crew to their hotel, the process of finalising the film turned into a record of its own impossibility. A thought-provoking mise en abyme of documentary and fiction, An Unfinished Film traces the making of a film in a world unmaking itself.

As the crew fragments into quarantined individuals, the film too breaks down: from a professionally produced object into a jagged assembly of phone videos that reconvenes the crew in the virtual realm. On an empirical level, Lou vividly evokes the anxiety and paranoia globally felt at the dawn of the pandemic – arousing our best and worst instincts – but also our profoundly altered relationship to images of ourselves and the world.

Lou’s film taps into a historical moment where both community and photography became hazardous to the state and society, turning the act of filmmaking into a fraught political enterprise. Tense, witty and ultimately tragic, An Unfinished Film synthesises a wide range of visual material to craft a poignant reflection on image-making as a survival mechanism. 

– Srikanth Srinivasan

Trailer