RESURRECTION | FOMO Secret Cinema Tbilisi - Asian Film Week

RESURRECTION

Bi Gan | 2025 | China | 1h40m + 10 minute intermission | Mandarin with English subtitles

RESURRECTION begins in a future where humanity has lost the ability to dream. One figure still can, moving through different identities, periods and imagined worlds as Bi Gan uses that premise to travel through more than a century of cinema. The result is science fiction, but not the kind built around explaining technology or constructing rules. Bi is interested in what survives inside images, memories and dreams when the world that produced them has disappeared.

That idea allows the film to keep reinventing itself. RESURRECTION unfolds across six sections that draw from different periods and styles of filmmaking, including silent cinema, expressionism, noir and fantasy, before building toward one of Bi’s characteristic extended takes. Rather than referencing film history from a distance, he lets each section temporarily adopt a different way of seeing and telling stories.

Bi had already developed this approach through KAILI BLUES and LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, but RESURRECTION expands it enormously. At 160 minutes, it asks the audience to surrender to changes in time, genre and perspective rather than follow a conventional narrative from A to B. It premiered in Competition at Cannes in 2025 and received the festival’s Special Prize.

Shu Qi gives Friday night an especially interesting connection. At 18:00 we see her in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s MILLENNIUM MAMBO, wandering through Taipei at the beginning of the 21st century as a woman remembering her own youth. At 20:30 she appears again, 24 years later, in a film preoccupied with memory on a much larger scale. Seeing the two performances back-to-back gives us two very different uses of the same actor, and two generations of Chinese-language filmmakers thinking about how the past survives in the present.

Jackson Yee carries much of RESURRECTION’s physical journey through its changing worlds, while Bi repeatedly alters the filmmaking around him. Camera movement, aspect ratio, lighting, performance style and genre conventions change as the film passes from one cinematic era into another. The shifts are the point. RESURRECTION is asking what happens when cinema itself becomes a form of memory.

The response since Cannes has reflected the size of that undertaking. Some viewers have found the film demanding or elusive; others have responded to it as one of the most audacious works of recent Chinese cinema. Either way, this is not a film designed to disappear quietly into a weekly release schedule. It is the kind of film that needs a large screen, uninterrupted time and an audience willing to follow Bi Gan wherever the dream takes him.

ABOUT ASIAN FILM WEEK

Asian Film Week is exactly the kind of programming FOMO exists for: major classics, cult discoveries and films you rarely get the chance to see on a cinema screen in Tbilisi. This week has been curated with Denis from Ukraine, a FOMO Film Club lifetime member with a real passion for Asian cinema, whose recommendations helped fill some gaps in my own knowledge and pushed the programme in directions I might not have reached alone.

A lot of care has gone into making the week feel broad, balanced and genuinely worth exploring. You’ll find landmark films from directors already well known in the West alongside stranger, more underground work that deserves a much wider audience. If Asian cinema is already your thing, I hope there are still a few surprises here. If it isn’t, I hope this week gives you a great place to start.