An Unfinished Film

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An Unfinished Film

2025

1h 45m

Drama

Documentary

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Tomatometer

Popcornmeter

81%

Tomatometer

32 Reviews

Popcornmeter

Fewer than 50 Ratings

In January 2020, director Xiaorui reunites his cast and crew to complete a film that was abandoned during production ten years earlier. However, the team is suddenly placed into lockdown together during the onset of COVID-19. Confronted with the challenges of the pandemic, Xiaorui and his crew are forced to determine how to move forward in a rapidly changing world. From acclaimed director Lou Ye (Suzhou River, Summer Palace), An Unfinished Film is "an utterly unique and very important movie about Covid, the crisis that affected all of us," (The Guardian). Combining fiction and documentary footage together, Lou Ye both commemorates those lost to the virus and creates "one of the most thoughtful, truthful and tactful depictions of the pandemic ever put to screen." (The Wrap).

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Critics Consensus

An Unfinished Film is a boldly destabilizing docufiction that delivers truthful, ground-level portrayals of how the pandemic reshaped filmmaking and togetherness.

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Jake Wilson

Sydney Morning Herald

04/30/2025

3.5/5

...we’re invited to reflect not only on the film Lou has made, but also the film he hasn’t made and perhaps can’t.

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Richard Brody

The New Yorker

03/15/2025

The vertiginous condensing of fiction and nonfiction, of past and present, has a radically destabilizing effect that’s inseparable from the audacity of Lou’s political vision.

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Alissa Wilkinson

New York Times

03/13/2025

Life gets in the way of art all the time, and art can be made out of life. What matters, the movie suggests, is hanging onto one another for dear life.

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Roger Salvans

Fotogramas

Aug 4

4/5

What begins as a comedy about the Chinese film industry evolves into an intimate drama and culminates as a testament to the collective trauma of COVID-19. [Full review in Spanish]

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Luis Martínez

El Mundo (Spain)

Aug 1

5/5

Lou Ye delivers an unclassifiable, enigmatic, and moving production about the great COVID crisis that kept the world on edge in 2020. [Full review in Spanish]

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Cinemanía Staff

Cinemanía (Spain)

Jul 31

4/5

Lou Ye once again creates a dialogue between his country's (in this case, very recent) past and its present. [Full review in Spanish]

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Penelope Y

@RT31899006 Aug 14

I was really looking forward to this film after hearing so many positive reviews. Unfortunately, I found it difficult to watch due to its hand-held camera style, which tends to give me motion sickness (similar to The Blair Witch Project). Because of this, I wasn’t able to enjoy the movie as much as I had hoped. But from what I could see, looks like an exciting story.

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Ye Lou

Director

Hao Qin

Jiang Cheng

Xiaorui Mao

Director Xiaorui

Xi Qi

Sang Qi

Xuan Huang

Ye Xiao

Ming Liang

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An Unfinished Film: Trailer 1

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Synopsis

In January 2020, director Xiaorui reunites his cast and crew to complete a film that was abandoned during production ten years earlier. However, the team is suddenly placed into lockdown together during the onset of COVID-19. Confronted with the challenges of the pandemic, Xiaorui and his crew are forced to determine how to move forward in a rapidly changing world. From acclaimed director Lou Ye (Suzhou River, Summer Palace), An Unfinished Film is "an utterly unique and very important movie about Covid, the crisis that affected all of us," (The Guardian). Combining fiction and documentary footage together, Lou Ye both commemorates those lost to the virus and creates "one of the most thoughtful, truthful and tactful depictions of the pandemic ever put to screen." (The Wrap).

Director: Ye Lou
Producer: Philippe Bober, Yingli Ma, Ma Yingli
Screenwriter: Ye Lou, Yingli Ma, Ma Yingli
Distributor: Film Movement
Production Co: Yingfilms, Essential Filmproduktion
Genre: Drama, Documentary
Original Language: Chinese
Release Date (Theaters): Mar 14, 2025, Limited
Box Office (Gross USA): $69.1K
Runtime: 1h 45m