A small-town doctor embarks on a journey to find his nephew in Bi Gan’s formidable meditation on time and memory, where the director functions as a medium in which his alchemistic ways reveal moments of pure symbolic and poetic wonder. 

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With a new, seemingly divisive film out at Cannes called Resurrection (2025), Bi Gan is one of Chinese cinema’s most sought-after young talents (he only just turned 36!), and it’s all thanks to Kaili Blues, which launched his artistic career in the best way possible, garnering comparisons to Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Andrei Tarkovsky. 

In fact, the film feels like the long-lost cousin of Hou’s Goodbye, South, Goodbye (1996), most evidently in the scene of a motorcycle travelling on a winding road as the camera tracks backwards to music, or being on trains as they enter or exit tunnels. 

While there is the occasional small-town gangster-esque tension over the billiard table, much of Kaili Blues feels tender and contemplative. 

Some might even describe it as rustically dreamlike as Bi Gan plays with the nature of time—narratively, structurally, and even technically, as the film’s famous 40-minute long take would attest. 

If you can rationalise the occasional camera wobble as a subtle warping of time, Kaili Blues becomes as formidable a debut feature as any. 

“I always have dreams when I sleep here. It’s unsettling.”

A doctor embarks on a journey to find his nephew, whom he suspects has been sold by his father, but truth be told, Bi Gan doesn’t really operate at the level of plot; instead, he functions as a medium in which his alchemistic ways reveal moments of pure wonder, whether symbolic (moving trains, clocks, etc.), or in the natural, undulating landscape of riverside towns. 

There is an intoxicating sense of the run-down, old-world textures of yesteryears in Kaili Blues, so much so that you can almost smell the locales. 

Sci-fi cyberpunk novelist William Gibson (the guy who coined the term ‘cyberspace’) once remarked, “time moves in one direction, memory in another”. 

So many filmmakers over the decades have tried, with varying success, to exposit this through the art of the moving image; Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues might be the most poetic example yet of the modern era—and in doing so, he also inadvertently dug up a new well of fresh cinematic possibilities, one that would give him endless inspiration for his sophomore feature, Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018).

Grade: A+

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