Mi Dian Yun Shan, The half-finished Heaven

The starting point of the film was my reflection on the transformation of space. Villages are demolished and relocated; people leave for distant places, cities, and high-rise buildings. At the same time, humanity is extending its reach toward the Moon, Mars, and the farthest depths of the cosmos.

It seems to me that, from the routines of everyday life to the most ambitious visions of the future, and even in our imagination of what awaits us after death, human beings are constantly searching for a place to dwell. Perhaps the lifelong task of humanity is simply to find—or build—a space in which to exist.

This made me question the relationship between people and space. How do the spaces we inhabit shape us, and how do we, in turn, shape them?

One reason I played the role myself was that almost all of the cast were my family members and friends. None of them were professional actors, and because we already knew each other well, the atmosphere on set felt natural and relaxed.

Another reason is that I prefer working with a small crew. When there are too many people around, I tend to become nervous.

As for Zao, his situation is very similar to my own, so there is a strong overlap between the character and myself. However, I do not have much understanding of acting as a craft. Most of my performance came from instinct rather than technique.

To be honest, I was probably not qualified for the role in that sense. Even now, I am not very comfortable watching my own performance on screen.

The film’s choral and intergenerational dimension comes largely from my own family history. In a sense, the film is a family autobiography.

Many of the people who appear in the film are my relatives, friends, and former classmates, playing versions of themselves. Their presence carries traces of their real lives, memories, and relationships.

I wanted the elderly and the young, the living and the departed, the future and the unborn, to share the same cinematic space. By placing them together within a single frame, I hoped to imagine life not as an individual experience, but as something that extends across generations and beyond the boundaries of time.

Yet beneath these broader ideas, the film remains rooted in everyday life. The characters are shaped by ordinary routines and modest aspirations, and it is through this simplicity that I sought to connect the film’s imagined world with reality.

The main reason is that I often wake up and fall back asleep multiple times during the night, and I tend to have many fragmented dreams. This led me to imagine the family ensemble as something that could be told through a dreamlike, multi-temporal structure.

I also began thinking about the long tradition of dream narratives in literature and art, both in China and elsewhere. In these works, dreams often blur the boundaries between reality and sleep, and between waking and dreaming. It becomes difficult to tell whether someone else is in your dream, or you are inside someone else’s dream. This non-linear, irrational quality of dreams provided me with many ideas for the editing and overall structure of the film.

At the same time, I did not want to foreground a “dream framework” too explicitly. I preferred to keep it subtle and ambiguous. Instead, I chose a multi-threaded narrative between different characters, and aimed to ground everything in a realistic, everyday texture, approaching a kind of life-flow form as much as possible.

On the one hand, the idea was that if different times and spaces can coexist within a single shot, then sound should also be woven together in a similar way.

Rather than thinking of voices as carriers of information, or ambient sounds as elements that construct a setting, I tend to think of all sounds as sound itself—as something more direct, almost like natural phenomena.

In this film, I was more interested in adopting the point of view of a sleeping dreamer, or more precisely, a point of hearing. From this perspective, everything we hear in the film can be understood as what the dreamer hears within a dream state.

By blending different kinds of sound together, I was trying to evoke a sense of fate that spans the past, present, and future. In a way, space and architecture become vessels that hold all living things, and I began to wonder whether all beings might, at different times, flow through space itself.

The main idea was to allow characters from different times and spaces to coexist within a single shot, unfolding gradually in a way that is closer to Chinese landscape painting, with its sense of shifting, scattered perspective.

In that sense, the true “protagonist” is sometimes not the characters themselves, but the space they inhabit. One could even say that many of the figures in the film are wandering souls, and the film’s overall visual and sonic orchestration is shaped by this kind of “spectral” point of view. As I mentioned earlier, all of this may also be understood as what is seen and heard by a sleeping dreamer.

There were also practical considerations in terms of execution during production. Although the staging was quite complex to design and coordinate, this approach helped us avoid certain errors when managing multiple groups of actors within the same scene.

For instance, through camera movement and the natural entry and exit of characters within the frame, we were able to ease some of the performance demands and reduce the complexity of staging and acting within a single take.

First of all, I would like to acknowledge my close friend Zhang Qiang, who also served as the art supervisor of the film. He is the founder of DDREDfilmlab, a film laboratory in China dedicated to film processing, development, and printing. His passion for celluloid and his ongoing technical exploration have influenced many of us. I would warmly encourage filmmakers from around the world to connect with him or consider collaborating with him.

I often discuss cinema with him, and after reading the script, he felt that the story would be particularly suitable for film, and he offered his full support. The whole team discussed it together, and we all agreed that shooting on film would be the right choice. The specific texture of 16mm film felt especially appropriate for a story that carries elements of landscape-like space, a sense of the spectral, and dreamlike temporality. For this reason, we chose to shoot on 16mm.

In addition, since the film is fundamentally built around ideas of space and architecture, I also see celluloid itself as a kind of spatial medium—a vessel, or even a house, that carries human stories and emotions. In that sense, shooting on celluloid felt conceptually aligned with the film’s core themes.

Shandong has long been regarded as a land that nurtures great minds, and is often seen as a spiritual homeland within Chinese culture. The Yellow River, known as China’s “Mother River,” flows through Shandong and ultimately enters the sea here. In the film, both the main locations and the dominant sonic motif are closely connected to rivers and the sound of flowing water.

The film was shot in Ju County, my hometown, a place with several thousand years of history. It is said to be where some of the earliest Chinese characters once appeared, composed of pictographic elements such as “sun,” “cloud,” and “mountain.” This character also inspired the Chinese title of the film.

During the Spring and Autumn Period, around 685 BCE, due to political conflict, a prince of the State of Qi took refuge in Ju County. After returning, he became Duke Huan of Qi, one of the most powerful rulers of that era. From this history comes the saying “Wu Wang Zai Ju,” meaning “Do not forget the place where we once existed.” This idea led me to reflect on whether all living beings might also carry a sense of longing for the places where they once existed, and whether life itself moves through different spaces over time.

Shandong is also home to two important writers: Pu Songling of the Qing dynasty, best known for Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Liao Zhai Zhi Yi), and Mo Yan, a Nobel Prize-winning author. Their works are marked by a strong sense of the spectral and magical realism, which has been an important source of inspiration for me.

This includes ideas such as spirit possession, the return of the dead, and also inspirations related to sound. Mo Yan once recalled a childhood memory of crossing a river at night, during which he heard mysterious, almost spiritual sounds coming from the water. Fearing he might disturb them, he chose to wait until dawn before crossing.

Pu Songling, meanwhile, wrote about a story in which a woman hides behind a curtain and imitates the voices of different people, animals, and objects while treating patients. Through her vocal performance, she creates the illusion that divine beings are descending to earth, and the patients come to believe they are witnessing the arrival of immortals.

These writings, which blur the boundaries between off-screen space, off-screen sound, and the interweaving and blending of multiple voices, have also deeply influenced my approach to cinematic sound design.

In traditional Chinese belief, it is often said that nothing is brought into this world at birth, and nothing is taken away at death. The traditional craft of paper votive offerings is used as a form of ritual for the deceased. These objects are made of paper, replicating various items from the real world. Once burned, they turn into ashes, symbolising the material needs and wealth that accompany the dead into another world.

In relation to the themes of the film, we primarily limited these paper offerings to houses, designed with reference to the twelve zodiac signs, suggesting a cycle of reincarnation. These paper houses, together with ancient temples, historic cities, modern apartment blocks, rural wooden homes, and even planets and the universe itself, all become possible forms of human dwelling and spatial existence.

This led me to wonder: are these spaces eternal and indestructible, or are they ultimately destined to disappear? Or are they, like cinema itself, merely temporary illusions of habitation?

The Chinese title of the film comes from the artistic aesthetics of Mi Fu and his son Mi Youren, painters of the Song Dynasty. Their brush technique is known as “Mi-style landscape painting” (Mi Dian Yun Shan). This style of painting creates a visual world that feels both real and illusory, where reality and imagination coexist, which felt particularly suitable for expressing a dreamlike narrative.

I was also drawn to the spatial dimension embedded in the Chinese characters themselves—“Mi” (meaning rice), “cloud,” and “mountain”—which evoke different senses of scale, height, distance, movement, and the shifting relationship between solidity and emptiness.

The English title, on the other hand, comes from the poetry of Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. In the film, I also quote the line: “Each man is a half-open door / leading to a room for everyone” (translated by Robin Fulton).

To be honest, I do not feel that I fully understand this poem, but I am deeply attracted to these lines. They seem to suggest that human beings, as living entities, may ultimately share a common spiritual home, a shared destiny, and a space that we are all moving toward. Or perhaps such a space does not exist at all—or perhaps it is not even necessary. This question lies at the core of the film’s reflection on death and return.