User Reviews

Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan's awards-winning debut, KAILI BLUES, in fact, the literal translation of its Chinese title is "roadside picnic", which appears to be the name of a frayed paperback collection of poems we can glance in one scene relatively near the beginning, and indeed poem suffuses in Bi's oneiric idiom, told through the voice-over of our protagonist Chen Shen (Chen Yongzhong).

The opening shot is a nearly 360-degree roving take setting against in a fixed position, a sparse clinic where Chen works with an elderly doctor (Zhao), they live in Kaili, a foggy, soggy, slight crummy town in China's southeast, subtropical Guizhou province. In lieu of plying audience with Chen's backstory, Bi cogently puts beauty derived from quotidian scenery in a salient place where a laconic storyline takes its form most subtly, the place where a young boy Weiwei (Luo) and his father Crazy Face (Xie) lives is decrepit and noisy to a fault, but strikingly there is a cascade just in vicinity, which promptly gives the said place an almost surreal grandeur, also Bi manifests his ingenuity by capturing the reflection of a passing train on the wall, a blunt intrusion brutally shattering the homely equilibrium but who can deny its aesthetic signification, plus, a passing train would later give the film's ending a divine "turning-back-time" coup-de-maître.

Soon it transpires that Chen is an ex-convict, and Crazy Face is his brother, but there is bad blood between them (which always has to do with family inheritance, properties in particular), Chen notices that Crazy Face is a deliberately negligent parent and suspects that he is going to sell Weiwei. So when Weiwei is sent away to Monk (Yang), a former gangster ringleader Chen once worked for and for whom he is locked behind the bars, he embarks on an excursion to look for his nephew Zhenyuan, and concurrently, to locate his colleague's old flame, who has Miao pedigree and now falls gravely ill.

The magic occurs when he reaches a town called Dang Mai, where Bi employs an audacious long take running over 40 minutes following Chen and other people he meets there, in particular, a local girl Yangyang (Guo), who is going to work as a tourist guide in Kaili and a young man also named Weiwei (Yu) who overtly carries a torch for her but she seems not to reciprocate. When reality, past, dream are entwined in that bucolic loop, Bi even risks betraying the camera's own existence in order to achieve this cinematic wizardry, is this Weiwei is a future version of Chen's nephew? Does the hairdresser (Liu) he meets is a reincarnation of his deceased wife? When Chen wears the shirt which is delivered to his colleague's Miao lover, is he reliving an imaginative past to give away the cassette, the pledge of romance and courtship? There are cues and incongruities, but the whole enterprise is so remarkably done that should it be singled out as an absolute high water mark from a tenderfoot in the sphere of filmmaking.

Taking the mantle from Chinese indie trailblazers (Jia Zhangke is the obvious object of reference), Bi Gan has a particular knack of marshaling amateur cast and sampling everyday settings to evince a strangely, but also affectingly enigmatic quality bordering on an amalgam of warmth, other-worldliness and allure, converging with its poetic undertow, kismet-galvanized mythos, beguiling scenery shots, peculiar camera composition and astonishing visual fluidity, plus other perverse quirks: the movie's title materializes roughly 30 minutes into its duration, and its opening credits are read out loud which harks back to Pasolini's THE HAWK AND THE SPARROW (1966, 7.5/10) where the credits are given a singsong treatment, KAILI BLUES is the whole package for art cinephiles, and more encouragingly, Bi Gan is very possible, "the" most electrifying discoveries of recent Chinese cinema.

I ended up going alone for Kaili Blues for a 10 PM screening at the Mumbai Film Festival 2015. In accordance with standard procedure, I entered the cinema hall baked and ready to enjoy what my cousin described the night before as simply mesmerizing. At first, the theme of the film is familiar. It is essentially a mission to rescue someone (Weiwei) whom the protagonist (Chen) loves. As the film progresses, it takes on an increasingly surrealistic tone, almost losing its way from reality into the imagination of Chen as he travels the hills of China in search of his beloved nephew. The highlight of Kaili Blues is its cinematography. But there is a directorial element that I absolutely adored; the extended shots! Almost reminiscent of Birdman or a Tarantino film, the camera effortlessly follows our hero on bike, foot and boat uninterrupted, as he experiences his past, present and future. I wish this film all the best and hope it releases in a cinema near you!

+++Chen is a doctor-he has a irresponsible brother who mistreats his son. As the movie progresses snippets of information about his previous life are dropped, almost casually, either through dialogue or flashbacks. Indeed, one theme is the temporal intermixture.

It's interesting for me to have insights into Chinese modern lifestyle shown directly through the street life (The Iron Ministry, Blind Shaft). Hence we see people going along with their business, poor people or desolated ones. Also, we see superstition, tedium, old traditions, appliances that don't work and vain attempts to fix them.

The second part is almost a different film. We leave the city, often grim, with glum buildings and we enter a mostly enchanting mountain area. As a reviewer mentioned we have a long shot as in Russian's Ark by Sokurov. Perhaps this technique is associated with filming in a way also seen in music videos: several young people, the same ones, continuously pop out and into the scene. The twirling sequence culminates by Chen revealing last piece of the story of his life to a hairdresser.

Now, the director pulls out an interesting feat. People borrow to each other moments of their lives and some people substitute for others. It is like being in a dream, which is constructed subtly and as if without strain. Examples: the flashlight story of Chen's coworker reappears in the story he tells to hairdresser; the latter is a substitute for Chen's ex-wife; the nephew is substituted by a motorcycle driver he meets who has the same name, draws watches, has a watch painted on his wrist, is bullied and to whom Chen offers protection-all these exactly like with his child nephew. Even more, two casually introduced persons share same nickname, Idiot.

And yes we share some more themes, more common in Chinese movies: lost love, responsibility toward family, choices to correct fatalities that lead to more tragedy.

---The camera filming the long shot has several failures, such as jerking or lack of focus. I can't say the movie is a masterpiece and it feels the debuting director wanted to express too much. But he made a compelling, interesting feature.

KAILI BLUES: A DEMANDING, STUNNING EXPERIENCE

KAILI BLUES is an extraordinary film….not just a good first feature, not just a good independent Chinese film.…but an imperfect dazzling masterpiece.

Audiences who watch normal films bring strong ideas of what makes effective, satisfying storytelling.…I came expecting another good festival art film from China, yet even as a film director/critic, it took me 45 minutes to suddenly realise and understand what the director was brilliantly achieving with fresh cinematic language and vision. From then on I was mesmerised and deeply moved.

This film doesn't satisfy cinematic art or entertainment preconceptions….It is unique, thrilling personal cinema, that communicates on different conscious and subconscious levels, conceptually, visually, emotionally.

BI GAN, the very young film director/poet in his 20s, is already an honest, open, accomplished artist, with well-deserved self-confidence (ego firmly in-check), dynamic creative ambitions, and skills to accomplish them. I don't want to burden him with this, or sound pretentious and preposterous – but I couldn't help flashing on Orson Welles during "Citizen Kane".

Wang Tianxing's cinematography was stunning, perfectly merging with the dynamic style and viewpoints of the story. No matter how many camera persons were used or their professional experience, everything flowed seamlessly emotionally. The magical 41-minute single moving shot is as revolutionary as Sokurov's landmark "Russian Ark," with greater psychological and emotional resonance. Memory, fantasy, and reality weave through and around each other.

Film crafts and cinema language are used smoothly and very effectively: visually powerful rural locations in Kaili, Guizhou Province, China (used with subtlety and respect), "costumes" (real lived-in clothes), props (from real homes and villages). Production design, sound, and editing are all creatively professional.

The Producers did a remarkable job during pre-production, shooting, and post-production, because there must have been daily stressful problems to overcome.

The actors – 99% non-professional - are perfectly cast and directed. Chen Yongzhong's memorable presence holds together all the wonderful characters in the 110-minute film.

Traditional Chinese, Miao, children's song, local band, actor's song, new music, and terrific end credit duet, are all evocative and touching.

KAILI BLUES should be seen at least two times, and discussed by film students in every international serious film school, and by audiences who are passionate about cinema in all countries within and outside China.

(Since this is a glowing review, I must say that I have absolutely no connection with the film or anyone who made it.)

This is one of the most beautifully shot films I've ever seen.

Kaili Blues is essentially a slow-paced, contemplative, slice-of-life film. The gorgeous mountainous background of China's Guizhou Province, and the excerpts of poetry written by the main character, add an enchantingly artistic quality.

There are not many moments of important dialogue shared between the characters, so this is best to be viewed when one is in a quiet, meditative mood, as it will leave you plenty of time to think and reflect.

However, despite the fact that I have enjoyed a variety of other art-house films that consisted of similar qualities (South Korea's "Poetry," from 2010, directed by Lee Chang-dong, comes to mind), this motion picture failed to enrapture me. Maybe it was the fact that I didn't feel I connected very much with the main character. To be fair, there isn't a lot of backstory provided for him.

If you want to feel that you have gone on a cinematic roadtrip through a subtropical region of China's countryside (as if you were driving along with photographers as they capture scenes of roads and towns for Google Earth), then watch this movie. If you want something fast-paced, humorous, thrilling, et cetera, then seek another option.

I was recommended to watch this film by a very good friend of mine who has the similar tastes on movies and literature and other kinds of art. He recommended me to see the short film Jingang Jing by Gan Bi. Yes, the short is good too, and has some kind of connection with Lu bian ye can. Back to the movie, it is the way he talk the story and shoot the film which makes me surprise and enjoy. When graduated from film Academy, Gan Bi became a video guy for weddings, and thanks to the wedding films experiences, he used the skills to this movie and the long dizzy shot brought me the climax of wander and fly. As a young director, this movie is a little immature to me, and to be honest, I enjoy this feeling.

A "hangout movie" but you're not sure if you really want to be there (or anywhere). There are boogeymen sprinkled throughout Bi Gan's debut feature film that are never seen: hairy "wild men" who live in the forests, gangs who do violent things like cut off people's hands before burying them alive. But it's the evils in plain sight (isolation, sadness, aging) that we really need to watch out for. At times, the film's slowness feels forced, and it's constant allusions to clocks/time kind of beat that metaphor to a pulp. But it's none the less a solid first feature from a budding Chinese director.

Your mileage may vary depending on which direction the trains and time are flowing. Curious to see bi-lingual Mandarin/English reviews, I tried to pause on the poems voiced over during the film, but too often they washed over me like the constant flow of water through-out.

The film is both heavy on symbolism, as well as strongly rooted on the earth, specifically the territory in the Guizhou Province, which apparently looks both rustic and post-industrial. Another review mentioned vehicles that fail that is a good metaphor for the film, but the viewer does travel with this film, if not where one might expect.

I am curious if the language ends up being a bigger tipping point to what is at play here. The blurring of characters/time perhaps indicated by key phrases or tenses. Or even in tense phrases, the scene in the make-shift salon where our Dr. Hero gets his haircut felt unsettling in an interesting way. And I wasn't even the woman giving the good Dr. his trim.

Besides the much discussed long single shot, so much fascinating tracking done (presumably by quite and highly reliable motorcycles) and great projected images at times.

Again I remain curious if this feels foreign to even folks familiar with the physical, if not emotional territory covered. I look forward to more films from Gan Bi after this auspicious beginning.

The set up for this film is long and not particularly interesting. The protagonist often narrates poetry that I didn't care for, and everything before the long tracking-shot felt boring and not anywhere near as compelling as the film that the director, Bi Gan, would go on to direct (Long Day's Journey into Night).

But everything from that long tracking-shot up to and including the ending (what a final shot!) is something unlike anything I've ever experienced before in film. Like a future or long-past memory being made and enacted in real-time.

We follow a handful of characters as they move about a small town in rural China, the camera switching seamlessly between them in an act of mesmerizing cinematography, no matter how they are travelling or however relevant they may seem to be to the mediocre plot. As this happens, we begin to familiarize ourselves with the location almost to the point that we could map it out, if we had to. You start to feel as though this town is a place you have actually (but only briefly) visited as a tourist who will go on to look back on the time spent there with bittersweet nostalgia. The people, the place. All of it. It has a personality of its own, but calls upon some of your own memories of places and people you remember well, but don't truly know all that well. Just as a tourist would remember but not know the people and places from his transient experiences with them.

Never have I felt so much of a connection to a location in a film, to the point where it practically feels like a real-life experience of my own.

All this might sound very wanky, which is something I was going to accuse the film of being until it reached this part of the film. It won't be the kind of movie that everyone will enjoy, and I'm not even sure I can recommend it.

I'm not entirely sure I understand the film's overall message. And I'm not even quite sure I want to, as it may take away from my very personal journey that it took me on. I probably won't even re-watch this film. Just as you can't relive memories so vividly. That said, just like Bi Gan's more recent film (Long Day's Journey into Night), it clearly plays around with the ideas of memory and dreams. Though I think Kaili Blues is more of a challenge to understand, with all the wanky poetry, cultural differences and references to "wild-men" urban legends.

Some great films can be ruined by a scene, whereas other films such as this, could be elevated from mediocrity to something fresh, exciting and beyond words.

Overall, Long Day's Journey into Night is a far better structured film, with a much more interesting protagonist and plot, but the flawed masterpiece of Kaili Blues manages to achieve something far more significant in its last 55 minutes (that goes by as quickly as a memory of a dream), than most films can hope to achieve in their entirety.

Bi Gan is a director worth the attention.

Kaili Blues - 8/10. Long Day's Journey into Night - 7/10.

Long before three-quarters of an hour had passed watching this one I was really struggling. Nothing had engaged me on any level and I could not really understand what was meant to be so good about this film. But then something pretty great happened – a 40 minute single shot which tracked various characters over huge distances and which was technically quite brilliant. I found myself actually pretty mesmerised by the sheer audacity of this single take. I would cautiously say that this shot is worth the price of admission alone, I say 'cautiously' because I really didn't like anything else about this movie at all! I am seriously thinking I maybe did not connect with events on account of a cultural gap of some kind because I did experience a pretty severe disconnect with this one, the 40 minute long take notwithstanding. It seemed to be about a man in search of a relative and it does have some nice photography from China's Guizhou Province. But if this one has a chapter index on its DVD release, I would maybe just suggest you jump directly to the extended take and just watch that. That may be sacrilege to some but I figure it is enough for me; in any case, I think this sequence of cinematic wizardry is what this film will ultimately be remembered for. A word often associated with this film is 'poetic' but I suspect if it was a poem it would be one of those annoying ones which doesn't rhyme.

This is truly a very surprising film. After glancing past a lot of reviews, I just thought of this film as the stereotype of many artistic films: obscure and crammed with inexplicable meanings. True, this film is all that, but not at all in a bad, sketchy way. First, you have to know that in order to really love the film, you have to be Chinese or have a very very deep association with the Chinese culture. Bi Gan, the director, tells a story from the most overseen part of Chinese culture, it is a part that often stems from a mixture of childhood memories, folklore, and the daily life. It touches me in a way not at all expected and seems to speak to me from the deepest, most hidden memories of childhood, when everything is sort of blurred and juxtaposed together. Second, what's also wonderful about this film is that Bi Gan was able to make this motion picture ----- which for decades has resembled storytelling ----- a poetic narration. He mixes together quite a bit of images and symbolisms, and although the way he puts it together seems to be quite intuitive, the product is incredibly beautiful.

This is the best independent Chinese feature film I have ever watched. The director is very talented and humble. The movie is about experiencing visions through time and space. A fusion of time and space. There is an exploration through the traces left by the passage of time.It has obvious difference with fiction and painting. The long sequence shot that lasts 40 minutes. So many audiences are curious how did he plan to shoot the sequence shot? He had conceived this long shot at least three years.

Congratulations to Bi Gan. His first film won many awards. The Chinese Oscar - The 52nd Taipei Golden Horse Award announced this year's nomination and BI GAN is one of the five nominees for Best New Directors.

Coooooooooooooooool ooooooooooooooooooooooosoosososooosss

Kailiblues is like a trance with grace and segues seamlessly between reality and memory.

Time plays in an endless loop in "Kaili Blues," it's internal and exterior landscapes where the old is being torn down in favor of the new, this import heralds an assured new cinematic voices forcing me to constantly re-watch, and reassess, the past. Mr. Bi Gan is far more interested in conveying emotion through visuals and symbols than through words or actions. There's always something curious situated beyond the characters, or on the edges of the frame - outside, a view of lush hills or decaying structures; inside, a piece of art or trash.

Tianxing Wang handheld cinematography often calls direct attention to itself, bobbing and jostling about as they mount.An impressive forty-minute tracking shot that follows Chen and several of the villagers, winding its way through the riverside town, taking shortcuts through alleyways, and at one point indulging in the rarely seen 180-degree vertical pan.

Diamond Sutra explains: "minds... are not minds, but are (expediently) called minds... neither the past, present nor future mind can be found." The same experiences recur across people and across time.

There is the pitch: A man looks for his nephew mistreated by his brother. The scene is set in a small province Chinese town.

Then, there is the style. The long sequence shot in the middle of the movie is mindblowing. The talent, the timing it requires for shooting such a scene are incredible.

This style takes us in a strange country where memory, periods of time, people, names blend and mix to create a unique atmosphere.

If you let yourself drift in this journey you'll be mesmerized.

This movie is an emotion, an experiment in itself.

And if you like it you MUST watch Bi Gan 's second film: "Long Day's Journey into Night" , which is even more.a successful achievement.

Welcome Bi Gan in the club of great and unique directors/creators, such as Fellini or David Lynch.

Back in 1989, as newborn baby Gan Bi was breathing in peaceful sleep, all nine Muses gathered around him, touched their pointers on his rising chest and in an exhale, blessed him with a seed of an idea.

The seed grew inside him. Alongside him. All around him.

And it kept growing. And growing. Until it took over, in height, in stature, in demand. Gan, much like The Little Prince and his rose, thought it his duty and honor to take care of his friend, to love and nurture it to full bloom. And when that time came, when the idea had blossomed to perfect ripeness, Gan dared to immortalize its beauty using the most encompassing medium to its fullest.

Colours, sound and echoing silence, shadows, poetry and violence, the rough and the velvety, time, love, devotion, laughter, hope and sorrow -- everything, all of it comes together like a Clotho-weaved veil of mystique, heavy with droplets of ambition that weigh it dangerously with ageless wrinkles without ever breaking its threads.

Can you tell I'm still engulfed in this feature's ever-folding, dreamscape palpitations?

In awe, this is the most human movie I have watched, possibly ever.

I am caged.

And here I want to stay.

I just loved it, they just blew my mind with that camera movement. Fact: they spent their entire budget on that long shot. Ah visually stunning images, the shift to different characters. Loved it, will really recommend if you are into world cinema.

I have never written a review for IMDb, but I was so mystified by the positive ratings on this film, I felt compelled to give my opinion.

First I will admit I am a US citizen from the Midwest. As such, it is possible I just don't get this film based upon my cultural biases. I have been a member of our local "foreign film series" since 1999, so I have plenty of experience with non-US films.

Kaili Blues bored me to death. First are the inexplicable behaviors of the main characters and their motivation (see above as to my admission of cultural ignorance). I couldn't understand anything they chose to do. On top of that was an almost non-existent story – characters just seemed to go from place to place with no reason. In one case, literally so – a young girl just walks a large circle. Finally, a lack of any urgency of the characters left me cold.

I will admit to one clever moment at the end that MAY have explained the film, but it came too little, too late.

Six people got up and left the theater. I wish I had.

So slowly paced and not focused on a topic. it is hard to persuade audience to continue watching.