It was announced on the sidelines of the Shanghai International Film Festival that Kogonada’s latest film, Zi, has been selected by Parallax Films for international sales outside of North America.
Set in Hong Kong, this feature follows Columbus and After Young by one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American independent film.
Shot over three weeks on the streets of Hong Kong, “Zi” stars Michelle Mao, Haley Lu Richardson and Jin Ha as three wandering souls caught up in a night that ripples through time. The film tells the story of a young woman who has a vision of her future self and encounters a strange man whose appearance reshapes the course of her night and perhaps her life. Kogonada, who also wrote and edited the film, built the project around Hong Kong’s special relationship with memory and movement, and it took the team three days to identify a geography that could be navigated primarily on foot.
Production was built along fundamentally independent lines. Seven core collaborators – Mr. Kogonada, producer Chung Ahn, producer Christopher Radcliffe, producer/cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, and actor/producers Mr. Richardson, Mr. Mao, and Jing Ha – jointly owned the project, shared responsibilities, and worked without outside funding. The team maintained a one-take-a-day discipline, with the script evolving day by day on location and sometimes scenes coming up on the spur of the moment.
Zi received a lot of attention when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and was subsequently screened at MoMI’s First Look Film Festival in New York. Guy Lodge reviewed the film in Variety magazine, writing: “’Zi’ captures the attention of our ears with the sounds of busy traffic at sea, the pitter-patter of pedestrians, the delicate insistence of nature and weather against a wall of man-made noise, all of which are typical of Kogonada’s elegant music choices and capture our ear’s attention.”
“Zi” is a co-production between the United States and Hong Kong, shot in English, Cantonese and Mandarin on a combination of digital and 16mm. The film is dedicated to the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, a composer who incorporated Kogonada’s experimental late music throughout the project.
