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Why you should watch Resurrection by Chinese film prodigy Bi Gan
After competing for the Palme d’Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, Resurrection, Chinese director Bi Gan’s third film, starring Shu Qi and Jackson Yee, is hiting cinemas this Wednesday 10th of December 2025. Discover our review of the feature film that won the Jury’s Special Prize.
By Olivier Joyard.
Published on 23 May 2025. Updated on 9 December 2025.
Resurrection, a tribute to cinema that has shaken up the industry
While Richard Linklater’s film Nouvelle Vague brought Jean-Luc Godard back to life by reenacting the filming of Breathless, the 2025 Cannes Film Festival welcomed another contender. A feature in which cinema itself becomes the beating heart and main narrative. Except that we might be witnessing its eulogy in Resurrection – a necessity for us to believe in its rebirth.
A far cry from the virtuoso comedy of the American director, Chinese gifted director Bi Gan, who already made Kaili Blues and Long Day’s Journey into Night, now delivers a deeply personal and beautiful reverie. Expect 2 hours and 35 minutes saturated with images at the crossroads between dreams, memories, parables, realism, fairytale, sci-fi, melodrama, and dark thriller.
Actress Shu Qi in the credits
Resurrection unfolds throughout multiple chapters. Embodied by Chinese superstar and TFBoys member Jackson Yee, the strange fate of the protagonist now takes shape. He is the last man capable of dreaming in a world that has forgotten how. He becomes the “cinema-man,” a monstrous figure. Well-known for her roles with Hou Hsiao-hsien, Shu Qi portrays a woman who enters his cinematic dreams and guides us through them.
We embark on a journey through the 20th century, tracing both the history of China and of the seventh art. As the film progresses, we begin to decipher the enigma of its construction and the effects it has on us. We drift through an ocean of surprises and symbols as Bi Gan stimulates our senses. Indeed, the film devotes separate parts to hearing, taste, smell, and finally, touch.
Bi Gan’s ambitious third feature
The film both strikes us and slips away from us. It is at times transparent, or completely impenetrable. Yet, that doesn’t mean it goes on the wrong track. The masterpiece we might have hoped for is not always present, but is it really a bad thing when the attempt is so vibrant, obsessive and spacey?
Bi Gan, 35, demonstrates formidable ambition. He works the films before him and cinema like clay, seeking to extract a unique creation, a light torn from the darkness of a world, which perhaps has lost faith in cinema. And where else better than the Cannes Film Festival to proclaim it?
What should we think of this film, recipient of the Jury’s Special Prize?
Cited and copied for its pith and marrow, the film evokes The Sprinkler Sprinkled by the Lumière brothers, Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai and Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans among others. Yet, it also imagines the future of cinema, free from linear narratives and using special effects to poeticize the world.
Thus, Resurrection is some kind of grand, impossible remake. Perhaps the last film in the history of cinema, but also the very first one. A sort of primitive, futuristic gesture. To not see it appear in the list of contenders for the Jury Prize, awarded by Juliette Binoche, would have been disappointing. Fortunately, the feature mesmerised the audience and won the Jury’s Special Prize during the closing ceremony.
Resurrection by Bi Gan, coming out in theatres on December 10th, 2025.
