AN UNFINISHED FILM: Once Upon a Time During COVID

It’s been five years since the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, and the way one senses the passage of time still hasn’t recovered; some days, it seems like the world was shut down only yesterday, yet other days, it can feel like a lifetime ago. Whatever the case may be, it might seem like a big ask to relive the fear, isolation, and trauma of those days on screen. However, director Lou Ye’s (Suzhou River, Spring Fever) hybrid docudrama An Unfinished Film may provide a much-needed sense of catharsis, functioning as it does as a cinematic archive of the early days of the pandemic when the city of Wuhan was abruptly locked down and life suddenly disrupted for all who lived and worked there. The fear and isolation are there, yes, but there is also resiliency and the will to survive.

Pause, Restart, Pause

An Unfinished Film begins in late 2019 as director Xiaorui (Mao Xiaorui) decides to resume a film shoot halted a decade earlier, booting up old computers containing abandoned footage and convincing the cast and crew to come back and finish what they started despite how everyone’s lives have changed since 2009. Cut to January 2020—just before Chinese New Year—near Wuhan, and the shoot is nearing its end. However, whispered rumors of a mysterious new illness are growing louder and more frightening and threaten to shut the shoot down for a second time.

Some members of the cast and crew manage to escape the hotel before lockdown commences, but the rest are stuck in their rooms, able to communicate with each other and their loved ones only through the medium of screens. This includes lead actor Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao), whose wife Sang Qi (Qi Xi) and infant daughter are locked down in a different city. There are moments of intense loneliness, such as when Jiang Cheng and Sang Qi attempt to fall asleep side by side via their phone screens, juxtaposed with much-needed liveliness, such as when the cast and crew celebrate the New Year together via a giddy group video call. Lives are in upheaval, yet one thing remains constant: everyone trying to make the best of their unfortunate circumstances in the hope that they’ll eventually reach the light at the end of the tunnel, much as we all did during the darkest days of the pandemic. As Jiang Cheng so aptly says, “I never expected this to happen to me in this lifetime. And not even in the next!”

Alone Together

Co-written by Lou Ye and frequent collaborator Yingli Ma (Saturday Fiction), An Unfinished Film is a collage of outtakes and on-set documentary footage from Lou’s previous films (representing the film of the title, as it were), news and documentary footage from key moments during the lockdown in China, and footage shot in the hotel documenting the “resumed” shoot and everything that happened afterward. This footage includes video calls between the quarantined cast and crew and those on the outside, reminding us how important virtual connection was to so many of us when it came to surviving the isolation period of the pandemic, In instances where cell phone footage is used, the vertical phone screen is integrated into the main shots, giving a theoretical sense of physical closeness to the characters while also highlighting how far apart they truly are in the real world.

These experiments in shooting and editing pay off because they accurately reflect the feelings and experiences of the time; years from now, if someone wanted to get a glimpse of what life was like during the COVID-19 pandemic—including that potent sense of claustrophobia from being shut up in one space and unable to leave for an extended period—they could do worse than watching this film. Towards the end, there is a powerful moment in which cell phone footage recorded by a woman tearfully leaving her house in Wuhan for the first time in months to join a tribute to those who died of COVID is seamlessly edited into footage of the same street when the lockdown was lifted and life went back to some sense of normality. (That is, before the Omicron strain started spreading.) Seeing an eerily empty street become full of people again – full of life – fills one with hope that is sorely needed right now. After all, if humanity could survive that, we can survive anything, right?

Conclusion

I’m not sure how many people are ready to relive the memories stirred up by An Unfinished Film, but the film’s creative and sensitive approach to depicting life during the COVID-19 pandemic deserves to be seen.

An Unfinished Film opens at Film Forum in New York on March 14, 2025, with additional markets to follow.