Bi Gan's Cinema

Spotlight on Bi Gan

Kaili Blues (2015)

Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018)

Resurrection (2025)

Very few directors can make their mark in international cinema with just a handful of films. In Bi Gan’s case, he was able to establish himself after just 2 features. Bi Gan got plenty of film festival love with his debut feature Kaili Blues but it was Long Day’s Journey Into Night that led to analysis of his technical style and visual wizardry. Resurrection has just increased those discussion and analysis points. Safe to say, the next Bi Gan film will have a much higher anticipation level.

The Bi Gan Long take

Any discussion about Bi Gan’s cinema will invariably feature his usage of long takes. Kaili Blues has a virtuoso 41-minute handheld sequence, Long Day’s Journey Into Night has a 50+ minute 3D shot and Resurrection has a 30-minute-long sequence. This has become his cinematic signature and his usage is different in each film. In Kaili Blues, the long take provides a thrilling immersive technical wonder while the long take in Long Day’s Journey provides an emotional mesmerizing experience. Resurrection combines both sentiments as the long starts off as a technical flourish before depicting passage of time, a melancholic aspect that is applicable to both the characters and to the overall film arc.

In Dennis Lim’s excellent interview, Bi Gan explains his usage of long take in all 3 films:

The long take has become a signature of yours. Would you say it is used to different effect in each of your films? 

I was not planning to use a long take in this movie. But it’s like an alcoholic who says they’re going to quit drinking. When things become difficult, you fall back on what you know. When we started on the doomsday chapter, we didn’t have many resources left, so I decided to go back to my familiar way of shooting with long takes.

In Kaili Blues, what I wanted was to convey the perception of time, not in a scientific way, but as normal people perceive it. For Long Day’s Journey, I used the long take to portray memory, which has a spatial aspect to it—going downward into memory. For this chapter about doomsday in Resurrection, I wanted to film from night through to the next morning. But we didn’t have the resources, so we used the time-lapse technique. For Kaili Blues and Long Day’s Journey, I had more time to build up the atmosphere in the long takes. Here it’s only 30 minutes long, so I tried other devices, like moving into a character’s point of view, and color coding. – Dennis Lim, Film Comment, Oct 2025

Memory, Time and Space

Bi Gan’s first two films, Kaili Blues and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, blended both past and present in depicting its events. Resurrection adds an imagined future to proceedings and thereby completes a time loop where the past and future are linked. Memories have always played a part in Bi Gan’s films but they take on a much more central role in Resurrection as the film imagines a future where dreaming no long exists and therefore, memories become a vital currency.

The budget and production quality has increased with each film but that has been inversely proportional to the story, meaning the story and narrative structure has decreased with each film. Kaili Blues is the closest to an actual story framework (even though it meshes past-present) while Long Day’s Journey Into Night has a much more fluid narrative framework and Resurrection has different chapters to outline events with a thread connecting all the chapters. Of course, it goes without saying that Bi Gan’s films are not traditional story driven films. His films are powered by the combination of stories with technical flourishes that result in an immersive cinematic experience.

Ranking Bi Gan’s films by cinematic experience

I have been fortunate to have seen all 3 films in an actual cinema. So I can rank them based on actual cinematic experience.

1. Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018)

A hypnotic mesmerizing experience enhanced by the switch from 2D to 3D. This was also the first film that I have seen which required a switch from 2D to 3D, cleverly timed with a character putting on 3D glasses in the film. Once the character puts on his 3D glasses, that was a cue for the audience to put on their own 3D glasses.

2. Kaili Blues (2015)

The technical wonder of the 41-minute unbroken sequence was a joy to witness. Going into the film, I was aware of this sequence but it was impactful to view different ways to depict a sequence without cutting.

3. Resurrection (2025)

Resurrection, Courtesy Janus Films

Lovely to see a journey through cinema, especially the inclusion of silent cinema sequence which paid homage to German expressionist cinema. The final sequence of a changing China reminded me of Jia Zhang-ke’s cinema, especially Still Life (2006).

Other Reading

1. Dennis Lim, Film Comment

2. Shelly Kraicer on Kaili Blues, Cinema Scope

3. Nick Schager on Kaili Blues, Variety