Curators’ note

An Unfinished Film, premiering at a Special Screening of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, represents Lou Ye’s own way of documenting the COVID-19 pandemic. At the present, when five years has passed since the pandemic broke out, when relevant memories may have faded away, our team wish to encourage a “memory exchange” of the pandemic in cinemas by bringing this latest work of Lou Ye to audiences. Through specially curated screenings, we expect the binding of memories. Although the film is based on Lou Ye’s experiences in China, we believe that it resonates with memories of people with different nationalities and from different walks of life, no matter when or where the memories were collected. The resonance may relate to pains, sufferings, and anxieties, or to warmth, healing, and fun. Bearing the “differences” and “commonalities” of the memories, the viewing experience of the film will become a journey of sorting and reviewing personal memories of the pandemic, a journey where memories of the director, the curator, and the audience collide, exchange, and fuse(Yixiang Lin and Wenqi Zhang).

Director’s interview:

Why did you ultimately choose “An Unfinished Film” as the title?

Lou Ye: It’s simply an unfinished “film within a film”. The ending of the film is a work screening for the team, and what they see is no longer the film that the director imagined. And we don’t know what will happen after the film ends……So the purpose of this film is to leave behind “evidence”; an archive, a fictional archive. Only in part; cinema can only be so reliable. The completion of the film actually makes me feel relieved, as it shows that cinema can indeed contain such subversion. From the perspective of the experimentation with cinematic language, my conclusion is: “Film will not die!” The film is evidence of that.