Best of 2025: Bi Gan dreams the death and “Resurrection” of cinema

by Cláudio Alves

Before dropping my top ten of 2025, sometime near the end of the season, there are a bunch of excellent films that have gone unreviewed at TFE. Let’s fix that…

With Warner Bros. for sale and Netflix as its most likely buyer, cinephiles worldwide are despairing over the future of the theatrical experience. As monopolies keep forming stateside, Hollywood seems bound to reach a breaking point any time soon, and the effects are already being felt beyond borders. And then there’s AI and a rising devaluing of human artistry, the production of content above all else. That said, to speak of the end feels premature, foolish even. Even if the mainstream American movie industry as we know it ceases to be, cinema is bigger than that. Indeed, it’s an art form still in its infancy, still transforming and coming into itself. If death is coming, it manifests as transformation and, in metamorphosis, there’s longevity that beckons hope. So, stop doomscrolling and hold tight to what you love, be it the medium itself or the communion of sitting in a dark room with others, facing the collective dream projected on a bright wall.

There’s a way to accept the pain of change without giving in to despair, to believe, to honor, to delight in the miracle of the moving image without falling into grief. Chinese wunderkind Bi Gan's latest, Resurrection, embodies such notions in ways few films have done. As it regards the past, it speaks to the present and the mystery of a future none of us can yet grasp. With equal parts adoration and sorrow, intellect and earnestness, sadness and a strange strain of fatalistic optimism, this multi-chaptered odyssey through the human senses whispers and screams: Cinema is dead. Long live cinema…

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TIFF 50: Xin Zhilei earns the Volpi Cup in "The Sun Rises on Us All"

by Cláudio Alves

Every year, folks think they can predict the wiles and ways of festival juries, forgetting that the smallness of such groups often privileges idiosyncratic tastes and produces shocking results. A jury festival is not deferent to critical consensus, so looking at reviews to divine their decisions is a fool's errand. Moreover, there's a tendency to think only the presupposed big players will vie for plaudits. It isn't so, and, honestly, that's a good thing. For sure, there are those who'll cry about Amanda Seyfried or Emma Stone not taking the Volpi Cup for Best Actress, but I'm glad Xin Zhilei got the prize instead.

Having watched Cai Shangjun's The Sun Rises on Us All at TIFF, I can confirm she makes for a worthy champion...

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TIFF '24: Wang Bing completes the "Youth" Trilogy

by Cláudio Alves

YOUTH (HARD TIMES) won a special mention at Locarno, the Junior Jury and FIPRESCI prizes.

Last year, Wang Bing presented Youth (Spring) at TIFF after the film's world premiere in competition at Cannes. It was to be the first part of an epic trilogy, one of a magnitude that's impressive even for such a grand muralist as the director is known to be. His filmography is full of works documenting the Chinese dispossessed, often curious about the labor forces whose strenuous efforts make the national economy work its exploitative, feverishly expansionist dream. For Youth, he focused his camera on the greener workers, a new generation consigned to a life of unfair garment labor, struggling to survive within the putative economic boom of modern China. Wang shot it between 2014 and 2019, dividing his findings between three films that collectively amount to a nearly ten-hour-runtime. 

At The Film Experience, we've already gone over Spring, so it's time to tackle Hard Times – competition in Locarno – and Homecoming – an erstwhile Golden Lion contender from Venice. The cumulative effect of these three monuments of cinema cannot be overstated…

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TIFF '24: A second opinion on "Caught by the Tides"

by Cláudio Alves

Zhao Tao in Jia Zhangke's CAUGHT BY THE TIDES (2024).

Every year, as the fall festival season hits, films heretofore seen by an exclusive set at their original premieres are given the opportunity for re-appreciation and new sets of critical eyes. It's always fascinating to see how a Cannes reaction may be upended at TIFF, for better or worse. Here at The Film Experience, that phenomenon is bolstered by a heterogeneous team whose opinions often differ. Consider the case of Jia Zhangke's Caught by the Tides, which played in the main competition at Cannes. To our own Elisa Giudici, it was a disappointment and an indisputably minor entry in the Chinese director's canon. For me, however, it's closer to masterpiece status, a cumulative wonder that's as major as you can get…

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TIFF '23: “Youth (Spring)” brings notes of optimism to Wang Bing’s cinema

by Cláudio Alves

Over a decade ago, Wang Bing’s first film explored the decline of an industrial district, state factories dying away as privately-owned businesses took over the Chinese economy. Since Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, the director has applied the same ‘fly on the wall’ technique to various other projects, each growing in size until his filmography resembles a collection of non-fiction epics. The 2002 picture clocked at over nine hours, edited down from 200 hours of footage. For his most recent endeavor, Wang recorded 2,600 hours of material, deciding to present it as a trilogy named after one of the most exploited demographic in the nation’s industry – Youth. The three-and-a-half-hour Youth (Spring) represents the first chapter in the director’s new opus, introducing new tonalities to his work…

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