Kaili Blues

Dir. Bi Gan. 2015, 113 mins. China. Digital projection. With Chen Yongzhong, Zhao Daqing. Chinese poet and first-time filmmaker Bi Gan has made an astonishing debut film that is at once mesmerizing and enigmatic, a dreamlike cinematic tour de force. The elusive narrative revolves around the journey of a doctor from the rain-drenched city of Kaili to look for his brother’s abandoned child. As J. Hoberman writes in The New York Review of Books, “[Bi’s] full-throttle filmmaking manages to evoke Resnais, Tarkovsky, Hou Hsiao-hsien without ever seeming derivative.”