This COVID-19 film is set right near Wuhan in mid-2019, straddling both documentary and fiction

Australia Broadcast Center

05-05-2025

An Unfinished Film is likely to repel those of us who refuse to be catapulted back to the strange, surreal and terrifying year of 2020. But what differentiates Lou Ye's docufiction film — beyond its layer upon layer of constructed meaning — is that it comes to us from the eye of the storm: a town near Wuhan.
Fast facts about An Unfinished Film
What:
A meta, self-referential docufiction film that takes you to ground zero of COVID-19.
Directed by:
Lou Ye
Starring:
Mao Xiaorui, Qin Hao, Qi Xi
Where:
In cinemas now
Likely to make you feel:
An intense feeling of déjà vu
As the severity of a new virus is making itself known, a film's cast and crew — a microcosm of millions of Chinese citizens — grapple with authoritarian dictates, enforced separations from their loved ones, and mounting pandemonium as billions of people around the world continue their lives unscathed, unaware things are about to indelibly change.
The film doesn't start in this place, however. It opens in mid-2019 with a crew, led by director Xiaorui (Mao Xiaorui), unearthing a 10-year-old computer with footage of the director's aborted queer film. This half-finished film is cobbled together from real-life outtakes and b-roll captured for Lou's own previous films, but the conceit surrounding its rediscovery is fictional — the first of many instances throughout the film where fact and fiction are interweaved and the boundary between pretence and reality is muddied.
The unfinished film is an intimate one, centred on a queer man desiring someone who's already in a relationship, with actor Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao, who did play a gay man in a Lou film) the lead.
Qin Hao (l) also played a main character called Jiang in Lou's 2009 film Spring Fever, and footage from that is used in the film.
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Filming was suspended due to creative differences with the funders — gesturing towards China's strict censorship laws — but Xiaorui wants to resume shooting it — partly out of a guilt he feels towards the cast and crew, partly due to a deep-seated desire to see it realised as a fully formed thing.
In a thoughtful debate between the introspective director Xiaorui and the frank Jiang Cheng — with the former trying to convince the latter to come back on board to finish the film — Lou raises interesting questions. What's the point of making art? Assuming the film doesn't pass the censorship board and make it into cinemas, who's the film in service of? The same questions could be asked of An Unfinished Film, which can't be shown in China to the very people who lived through what it's documenting.
Fast forward to February 2019 and it's clear Jiang Cheng has relented to reshooting the film. Fresh off the birth of his baby son, Paopao, he's staying in a hotel near Wuhan with cast and crew as they finish shooting the film's last few scenes. But providence has other plans for them.
A mysterious illness is taking hold of Wuhan, and the authorities act swiftly and decisively, cordoning off the hotel to anyone entering or leaving after a crew member collapses from what is later confirmed to be COVID.
Mao Xiaorui (l), who is a director himself, plays director Xiaorui in An Unfinished Film.
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Cue an imposed lockdown for all the cast and crew left behind, including Jiang Cheng, who becomes the eyes through which we witness the early stages of the pandemic unfold. Confined to his room after a thwarted attempt to escape the hotel, he occupies himself by filming goings-on from his window and engaging in the Chinese equivalent of FaceTime with his emotionally frayed wife Sang Qi (Qi Xi) as their lives transpire in parallel — he under hotel arrest, she under house arrest caring for their infant son.
Stripped bare of any artifice, the naked intensity of their conversations captures a couple in crisis — their unbridled happiness at being new parents is tinged with a heightened feeling of vulnerability as they're besieged by stories of families split up in the ensuing melee.
"I am such a coward now," Jiang Cheng remarks as he contemplates his oversized importance to his family. Their shared grief brings out truisms, but clichés are clichés for a reason.
Many things about Lou's film will jump out to a Western audience. One of them is the striking readiness of everyone in the hotel to immediately don a mask once it's clear a mysterious illness is afoot. It's regarded as the natural thing to protect oneself and others, instead of something contestable that infringes upon one's person-hour, as it's been construed in the West.
In the blend of documentary and feature, DOP Jian Zeng appears here as himself.
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With most of the film confined to the four walls of Jiang Cheng's hotel room, it necessarily loses the momentum of the frenzied scenes that accompanied the rollout of the hotel's lockdown and veers into something far more mundane and repetitious — befitting the new rhythm of Jiang Cheng's days.
The discombobulation of the moment in time is adroitly captured by Lou in a move similar to The Seed of the Sacred Fig's director, Mohammad Rasoulof, who
A particularly memorable montage ensues when quarantined cast and crew jump on a group call to celebrate the eve of Lunar New Year, their giddy delirium at celebrating together in isolation capturing something highly distinct and unforgettable about those early moments of connection in the pandemic.
Lou wrote the script with his wife and longtime co-writer, Ma Yingli, who's also a director.
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Supplied: Sharmill
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The effect of the film disperses slightly when it moves from its fly-on-the-wall approach to the swift documenting of various events of the time through the framing of a mobile phone.
The February 2020 death of
At a time when the broader world has erroneously moved on from safeguarding against a life-threatening virus, it's striking to be transported back to a time and place so unlike the West: where walls were scrubbed clean to prevent contamination, hotels were locked down due to a single positive case of COVID, and people were quarantined without an end in sight.
A sort of undeniable truth emerges from a film too fictive to be considered a documentary but too factual to be considered a feature. And within it, perhaps there is some hope of collective catharsis for China.
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