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Posted on 01/23/2026 12:29:13 PM PST by sphinx
The film, which follows a young Hong Kong woman (Michelle Mao) who spends a night traversing the city with two new acquaintances (Jin Ha and Haley Lu Richardson) as she tries to make sense of dangerous visions of her future, was a true collaboration between Kogonada and six of his best friends....
He asked the three actors, longtime cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, and producers Christopher Radcliff and Chung An to meet him in Hong Kong with little more than a faint idea for a movie. They started shooting almost immediately, figuring out the film as they went along....
“These are six of my favorite people,” Kogonada said. “The invitation was, ‘Hey, let’s all meet in Hong Kong, we all have to pay for ourselves. Let’s just meet there and let’s create something together and let’s do it for a few weeks.'”
(Excerpt) Read more at indiewire.com ...
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The big studios are in a death spiral. The question is what will replace them. This looks interesting -- and for reasons that are quite independent of whether you like this thematically or narratively. It's said to be micro-budgeted. Per the story, the entire team -- a total of seven people, including all three actors -- paid their own way. They went to Hong Kong (why there, I don't know), hung out for three weeks, and made a movie. The world premiere is tomorrow night, and it is now seeking distribution.
For those who keep track of such things: this ain't a Hollywood movie, but it IS a pure American indie bootstrap project. Five of the seven people involved are American (two of them first generation immigrants from Korea, having come here with their parents as children). I don't know about Michelle Mao, and I gather from the story that Chung An was born in Hong Kong but I don't know more about him.
Zi was shot guerilla style: no sets, no sound stages, no artificial lighting, using found spaces and ambient lighting. I don't know if they pulled permits for anything; Hong Kong now being a fiefdom of the God King Emperor Zi, I suppose tipping off the Gestapo would be a good thing to do, but that could be interesting. Nor do I know what kind of cameras they used, but presumably they were light and hand held. Some indie films have been shot on iPhones; I suspect they did a bit more here, but I don't know.
No word about cost, but I have an interest in very low budget films. Kogonada's first feature film, Columbus, was shot for $700,000, and the filmmakers partnered with Sundance on an experimental self-distribution experiment. I used to think that was pretty cool. Then I discovered Primer ($6,000, mostly spent on film) and Coherence ($30,000). There are other examples. I will be interested in knowing what Zi cost -- and if everyone paid their own way ....
Why would anyone sign on for this?
I'll just note that on EVERY Kogonada project, EVERY actor speaks in admiring and enthusiastic terms about what a decent, thoughtful and insightful collaborator he is. Yes, movie people make happy talk on the red carpet. But the praise for Kogonada, to my ears, goes beyond that. In this case, the other six people involved have all worked with him in the past, several of them going back a long way. And they paid their own way to work with him again. Kogonada seems to be one of the good guys still fighting the good fight against studio rot.
This was shot in total secrecy. No one outside the small team and the Sundance people even knew it existed until Sundance announced it as a selection. As far as I know, there have been no test screenings. (Those cost money.) The world premier is tomorrow night at 8:45 p.m.
Is it any good? There are two reasons to hope it may be: the track records of the people involved, and the fact that a major festival selected it. Like other festivals, Sundance's selections aren't any kind of gold standard (I spotted five among this year's selections that I know I'll watch), but at least a group of professional film people have watched it and thought it had enough merit to make the cut. Beyond that, we'll start to hear more tomorrow night. Sundance has kept a hybrid model since covid, with some selections available online starting on January 29. I got an online ticket, so freepmail me if you are curious.
The big studios have tentpole disease, too many layers of corporate bureaucracy fouling the process, too many people dipping at the till. They're trapped in a high cost model that systematically saps creativity and quality. This is a deliberate leap to the other extreme.
I've recommended Nouvelle Vague to the movie ping list as an underseen gem of 2025. That is Richard Linklater's homage to Jean Luc Godard, one of the key figures of the French New Wave. It's about Godard making his first feature film in 1959, in which he set out to break as many rules as he could and improvise his way to a movie. Richard Linklater didn't shoot Nouvelle Vague that way; he had worked on it for 15 years, and the whole thing is meticulously planned and formally shot (in black and white, in French, and on the streets, not on sound stages). But Nouvelle Vague sets out to recapture the anarchic, free spirited rebelliousness of the young Godard, and IMHO, it does this beautifully. And it is a very funny movie if you shut down all the distractions and watch it closely; it's made for the theaters, not for doom scrolling, multi-tasking couch potatoes in the streaming audience. Kogonada has also mentioned Godard as one of his important influences, and he is taking that spirit to the limits.
I hope it's good. I hope it makes lots of money -- and given the micro-budget, "lots of money" doesn't have to be all that much to give the filmmakers a great success on their three week friends-making-a-movie jaunt to Hong Kong.
Let Hollywood crash and burn. Support #Resistance.
Movie ping list.
I spotted five films that interested me in the Sundance lineup, none of which I had heard of before Sundance listed them. Just another way to do a little scouting for good movies that aren’t big studio projects and therefore don’t get big promotional spends.
A lot of the good stuff today flies under the radar screen. Ya’ gotta start somewhere ....
You are correct. Titles?
The title of the movie is “Zi.”
Most people don’t realize that the original Alien and Terminator movies were low budget. I have a theory that the more $ a scifi move has budgeted, the worse it is. Compare Avatar with District9. Night and day quality. District9 totally owned Avatar that year.
Then there is the greatest action movie of all time. Commando. Also low budget.
On that note, the original Star Wars was considered low budget.
Ensemble style films used to be more common. A familiar group of creative and experienced people, getting together to form something new, something that didn’t depend on production, musical scores or CGI to tell the story.
All that polishing of the apple came later, if the idea ever took root.
It worked well for directors like Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, Adam Sandler and Tyler Perry.
No interest whatsoever, none.
Yes. I remember that now. Relatively small budget. Once again proving my theory.
Another decent little low budget scifi was Pitch Black. Then there was the excellent little time travel story, Primer. Less than one million budget. Time travel handled intelligently.
Hey ... whatever rings your chimes. I do try not to snark at other people’s genre preferences ....
How did you like it?
Kogonada’s first two films (Columbus, After Yang) are among my favorites, so I am interested in whatever he produces. Zi might be good, at least for those of us who like his style.
But the micro-budgeting thing also caught my interest. We spend a lot of time kvetching about the big studio/streaming doom loop, the bloated budgets, the lack of originality, the endless recycling of stale IP, etc.
Kogonada and six friends paying their own way to Hong Kong and collaborating on a project they were writing on the fly is about as polar an opposite as one can imagine.
I hope they made something good. It’ll be interesting to see if they get good distribution offers at Sundance. And I hope those will include a long theatrical window and a DVD/Blu-ray release.
We are watching for the film “Dead Man’s Wire” which I think is an independent film by Gus Van Sant.
Don’t know if it made the Sundance expo but it was just released last week.
We were aquainted with Tony Kiritsis, the main character in the true story, back in 1965.
He lived across the street from us in the trailer park that he managed.
Its a long story, but we were forced to move when I had a major disagreement with Tony about who we could have as guests in our home.
Our grandkids are impressed that Grandma and Grandpa were actually kicked out of a trailer park by Tony Kiritsis.
Thanks for the ping.
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