Bi Gan (filmmaker)
Bi Gan is a Chinese film director, screenwriter, poet, and photographer.
Bi’s feature directorial debut, Kaili Blues, earned him Best New Director at the 52nd Golden Horse Awards, Best Emerging Director at the 68th Locarno Film Festival, and the Montgolfière d’Or at the 37th Three Continents Festival in Nantes. His follow-up feature, Long Day's Journey into Night, was selected for the Un Certain Regard section at the 71st Festival de Cannes and earned him a Best Director nomination at the 55th Golden Horse Awards. His third feature film, Resurrection, premiered in Competition at the 78th Festival de Cannes and was presented with a Special Award by the jury.
In June 2025, Bi was invited to join the Directors Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Biography
Bi was born in Kaili City in Guizhou Province on 4 June 1989. He is an ethnic Miao.From 2008 to 2011, Bi Gan studied television directing at the Radio, Film, and Television Cadre College in Taiyuan, Shanxi. The college was renamed in 2013 as the Communication University of Shanxi.
During his college years, Bi watched Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, later stating in an interview, "Cinema can be different ; you can make what you like. What I had seen up to that point were mainly Hollywood films. What I was taught was pretty boring." Because of this particular film, he made up his mind to pursue filmmaking. "Before that, my parents and my relatives thought I would become jobless after graduation since I didn't want to do anything."
Filmmaking career
In 2010, Bi made the short fiction film South, which won the first prize at the university-sponsored "Guang Sui Ying Dong" Film Festival.Two years later in 2012, Bi made a black-and-white short film Diamond Sutra, which features a story of murder in a small isolated town in the mountain. The film received Special Mention Award from the 19th Hong Kong ifva (Incubator for Film and Visual media in Asia), an award organized by Hong Kong Arts Centre, and was ranked top 10 at the 9th China Independent Film Festival in Nanjing, China.
In 2015, Bi's debut feature film, Kaili Blues, which he also wrote, brought the emerging director international recognition. The film won Best New Director and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 52nd Golden Horse Awards, Best Emerging Director at the 68th Locarno Film Festival, and the Montgolfière d’Or at the 37th Three Continents Festival in Nantes.
In 2018, Bi wrote and directed his second feature film, Long Day's Journey into Night, starring Tang Wei, Huang Jue, Sylvia Chang, and Lee Hong-chi. Set once again in Guizhou Province, the film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 71st Festival de Cannes. It received five nominations at the 55th Golden Horse Awards, including Best Feature Film and Best Director for Bi, and went on to win three: Best Cinematography, Best Sound Effects, and Best Original Film Score.