PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED: LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT
In association with EYE Filmmuseum our Previously Unreleased program brings films to our cinema that have garnered acclaim at film festivals worldwide, but for some reason weren’t released in the national theaters. The unexpected love child of Wong Kar-wai and Andrei Tarkovsky, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, is the very definition of art cinema, and it will baffle and possibly enrage casual filmgoers expecting such niceties as plot. It is a movie not to be followed but steeped in and ultimately surrendered to.
— IN 2D AND WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES
Bi Gan follows up his knockout debut, Kaili Blues, with this noir-tinged stunner about a lost soul (Jue Huang) on a quest to find a missing woman from his past (Wei Tang, Lust, Caution). Following leads across Guizhou province, he crosses paths with a series of colorful characters, among them a prickly hairdresser played by Taiwanese superstar Sylvia Chang. When the search leads him to a dingy movie theater, the film launches into an hour-long, gravity-defying 3D sequence shot that plunges its protagonist—and us—into a labyrinthine cityscape. China’s biggest arthouse hit of all time, the film took in more than $40 million dollars in its opening weekend at the domestic box office.