An Unfinished Film

Relevant and moving, deeply personal yet universally resonant, An Unfinished Film by Lou Ye revisits footage from the past and brings order — through intelligent, unconventional filmmaking — to the flood of memories and mobile-phone images that overwhelmed us during the COVID years.

The film begins in 2019, with filmmaker Xiaorui and his team discovering fascinating old footage from a project abandoned 10 years earlier. This unfinished work, reminiscent of Lou Ye’s critically acclaimed Spring Fever (TIFF ’09), brings back poetic images of past youth with sequences featuring a gay couple. Nostalgia and the desire to bring completion to a project dear to him prompts Xiaorui to reunite his original crew to complete it. Their efforts, however, are disrupted by the onset of COVID-19 in Wuhan, forcing the group into lockdown.

Blending fiction with real footage from social media, Lou Ye creates a unique documentary-style narrative that conveys the early days of the pandemic. The film shows the characters’ lives in suspension: confined to their hotel rooms, they communicate through screens and experience the monotony, anxiety, and isolation that defined those months. It juxtaposes painful and dramatic moments with flashes of joy and culminates with the lifting of the lockdown and commemoration of the victims. This blend of personal narrative and broader societal impact stands as a unique testament of and tribute to a nation’s trauma. Lou Ye captures the essence of confinement and the struggle to maintain creativity amid chaos in a profound exploration of unfinished projects and the broader sense of unfinishedness imposed by the pandemic.

GIOVANNA FULVI