In a neon-drenched port town on New Year’s Eve, 1999, a hoodlum named Apollo, who has never kissed a girl, falls for a beautiful young singer named Tai Zhaomei. As the rain batters down, this Y2K Romeo and Juliet slip into the backstreets, coming up against mobsters, biker gangs, karaoke singers, gunshots, flocks of birds, drug dealers, and even vampires in a bid to steal a ship and escape to the sea. The average filmmaker might stage such a sequence with a sense of style and verve. But Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan does it all in a single, 40-minute unbroken shot, culminating in one of the most mind-blowing sunrises ever captured in cinema.

The film is Resurrection: a boundary-pushing and philosophical arthouse epic about dreams, the senses, and over 100 years of filmmaking. It sparked spontaneous applause at Cannes in 2025, where it was awarded the Special Jury Prize. In Bi’s native China, meanwhile, it topped the box office despite its unwaveringly anti-commercial presentation. Described as “a cinephile’s delight” by the New York Times, and ranked among Letterboxd’s ‘Highest Rated Films of 2025’, the movie finally receives a wide UK release in March 2026 following an appearance at the BFI London Film Festival. And if audiences were wondering whether movie magic still exists in the age of franchise sequels and reboots, well, here’s your answer.

“The audience sees this very beautiful passage,” says Bi Gan, speaking to Dazed via video call in November 2025. “But behind it, it was just pure chaos.” 

At 36 years old, the director already boasts a ludicrous pedigree for ambitious filmmaking. Since bursting onto the international scene with 2015’s Kaili Blues, he’s established himself as a kind of high-tech successor to long-take greats like Andrei Tarkovsky. His dazzling 2018 neo-noir Long Day’s Journey Into Night, for one, famously concluded with a mind-boggling 59-minute long take shot in 3D, involving a cable car journey, a motorbike ride, and a game of ping pong. But even with the requisite experience to consider such staggering feats of filmmaking, the act itself is never simple.

“We started doing rehearsals [for the long take] about half a month before the shoot,” the director continues. The climactic setting in Resurrection – Chongqing, recently fixated on in social media as China’s “cyberpunk” city – was chosen for its warren-like back alleys and close proximity to a railway system and a harbour. “After that, we filmed [every night] from two or three until 7am. It was hours and hours of shooting to create about 30 minutes of footage in the end film – three hours of which were condensed as a time-lapse to create a dream-like vibe.”

Unsurprisingly, there were countless obstacles to pulling off such a complicated scene. They were shooting at night; the lighting fixtures could get so hot that they’d burn, says Bi. To create rain, they used a network of pipes and sprinklers, which then all had to be obscured. And to be able to move flexibly through such a labyrinth of alleyways, they had to use as few crew as possible. Still, “in every single move, there were at least ten people following, doing set-up and planning [for the next steps],” the director says. “It’s very hard.”

“You see this archetype in a lot of literature – a monster that might be ugly on the outside, but soft on the inside, and compassionate. It’s an archetype that can raise people’s feelings and emotions”

Perhaps even more impressive than the long shot itself is that this is but one small highlight of a multi-chapter narrative, encompassing mysterious parables, trace-like sequences, and a wealth of old-fashioned physical effects. Resurrection’s wider story concerns a dystopian reality where dreaming is a dissident act, with Yee (who plays five distinct roles in the film) playing a disfigured monster who, in his final moments, relives a series of fantasies that draw from distinct filmmaking styles from across a century of cinema. Each chapter zones in on a different sensory experience, resulting in an odyssey that is at once a paean to cinema ,and also to the human condition.

The first dream – the “listening” chapter – sees Yee play a fugitive musician’s companion in a desolate city in the mid-20th century. “We referenced film noir elements, and used very specific proportions of lights to get this contrast with the shadows,” says Bi. Later, Yee’s a toothache-stricken art thief in a deteriorated Buddhist temple; a chapter originally conceived to take place in outer space. The “smell” chapter follows a con artist who swindles a gangster by teaching a young girl tricks that suggest she can recognise playing card values from scent. But it is the encompassing chapter, staged in a dystopian near-future, that is perhaps the most formally engaging, recalling the aesthetics of silent cinema with nods to classic monster movies and German Expressionism.

“The passion towards silent film comes from how people created films at that time,” says Bi of these segments. “You’d have a still frame, but then you’d need to make all the movements inside that framing, so they’d use the theory of perspectives to create movements and generate illusions.” 

He describes watching a clip featuring Charlie Chaplin, in which the actor roller skates around a building along the edge of a perilous drop. “The crew had drawn half of the background onto a board, and then they’d use this front and back mismatch to create this illusion effect,” he says. “We borrowed something similar in the opium den scene [in Resurrection], painting the opium den silhouette onto an acrylic board, but then shooting in a big space where only the stairs were real. What you see is a mixture of real stairs and the fake painting. Even I find it hard to tell the real and the fake apart.”

Amidst all this fascinating formal creativity, Bi spotlights a classic movie monster to act as a sympathetic proxy for the audience: a Quasimodo-esque hunchback with a hideous face, inspired in part by Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera from 1925. “You see this archetype in a lot of literature,” he says. “A monster that might be ugly on the outside, but soft on the inside, and compassionate. It’s an archetype that can raise people’s feelings and emotions.”

It’s also an archetype that, in some ways, mirrors the director himself: he’s complex; the subject of much fascination; and hard up against it in his bid to make a mark. But the real gargantua is undoubtedly Resurrection itself; an almost-impossible feat of fantasy that resembles few other works out there; a beautiful beast with one leg in the past and another firmly in the future. It’s the ultimate cinematic sorcery – and the kind that audiences will surely talk about for years to come.