Hunting for Fairy Tales at the Athens International Film Festival

Fairy tales are often told to children before bedtime, and, being an overtired, middle-aged child myself, I naturally whined to anyone who would listen about the late showtimes of the movies featured at the 2025 Athens International Film Festival. When the moment actually came, however, the fear of biorhythmic disruption faded, and I was excited to stay awake for three films with fairy-tale qualities—Kuang ye shi dai (Resurrection, Bi Gan), La tour de glace (The Ice Tower, Lucile Hadžihalilović), and Phi chai dai kha (A Useful Ghost, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke). How would these three wildly different directors, operating across many genres, modes, and tones, interpret their fabulations for adult audiences?Resurrection, which presents itself as a sci-fi drama pastiche, brought Bi the Special Award this year at the Cannes Film Festival. Each of the film’s six sections represents one of five senses (plus the mind, which is added as a sixth sense), as expressed through a different cinematic mode: silent, noir, folk tale, urban, and, finally, a vampire love story. It reminded me of a virtuosic cooking competition where the chef must prepare the same ingredient five different ways, and it almost breaks them.The film’s premise is explained (sort of) in the opening title cards and voice-over. In a dystopic future, humans no longer dream, finding that dreams cause suffering and a shorter life. However, there are a few “Deliriants” (or “Fantasmers,” in other subtitled versions), who still prefer to dream even if it means living shorter lives. Somehow able to disappear into cinema itself, they hide out in films, where they are able to jump through time and avoid capture by the “Big Ones,” who are Blade Runner–type individuals capable of seeing through illusion. They pluck out Deliriants so that these dreamers cannot disrupt the linearity of time with their circular dreams. Conventional story cohesion does not seem the point; Bi says that he hopes the audience watches for sensory “pathways,” instead of tight plot points.1Where better to start exploring a sensory pathway than in a smoky opium den, vibrating with the jeweled tones and dark wood of a set that evokes Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Hai shang hua (Flowers of Shanghai, 1998)? Viewers find themselves in the silent era (in the chapter representing vision) as the Big One (legendary Taiwanese actress Shu Qi), wearing a nineteenth-century Marie Curie–style dress, leaves the opium den and passes through off-kilter sets and chiaroscuro lighting redolent of German expressionism (Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari 1920 in particular). She chases down a battered, Nosferatu- and Quasimodo-like monster known as the Deliriant (Jackson Yee). When she finds him, he is on the ground and gorging on poppies. Through title cards he says that he does not want to live if he cannot dream. This statement not only points to an overarching raison d’être for the film itself but also seems to reference the poem “Corona,” by Paul Celan: “We love each other like poppy and memory, / we sleep like wine in the seashells, / like the sea in the moon’s blood-beam.”2 These images return as part of the atmosphere in future sections. Before eventually settling on Diqiu zuihou de yewan (A Long Day’s Journey into Night, 2018), Bi, a poet and fan of Celan, almost titled his previous film Poppy and Memory, reflecting Bi’s, as well as the Big One’s, preoccupation with the textures of memory and dream. As she cleanses the captured Deliriant in her workroom, which resembles a photography studio, she cuts open his humpback (this is mechanical and bloodless), where a projector and film reel are hidden. As tears stream down the Deliriant’s face (in the style of the heroine in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928), the Big One loads the reel into the projector and watches the film. The audience sees what, in Shu’s voice-over, she calls the Deliriant’s “gentlest,” or possibly most innocent, illusion: in choppy, hand-cranked footage, the Deliriant drinks from a water hose and drops to the ground in a vast, tinted-green meadow (an allusion to the comedic garden-hose scene from the Lumière brothers’ L’arroseur arrosé (1895). A tender and curious feeling arises in the Big One, who delays the removal of the Deliriant so that she may watch more of his memories.A close-up of a burning candle marks each new chapter. Viewers are next transported to a steamy 1940s Shanghai train station strongly reminiscent of film noir (with references to Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai 1947 and Melville’s Le samouraï 1967). The Deliriant is now handsome and young, though injured. A detective known as the Commander (Mark Chao) is tracking him for a murder case. In keeping with the murky plot elements inherent in noir, there’s torture, a suitcase containing a theremin, strains of Bach’s Come, Sweet Death (1736), and a shoot-out in a room of mirrors.Each chapter also features the loss of a sense; here it is hearing. In a prelude to the moment he punctures his ears with a fountain pen, the Commander claims, “If I lost my hearing, I would go through the mirror,” evoking Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950), whose title character’s trip through the mirror launches his journey through the “zone,” an underworld comprising the interstitial land of dreams. Further hinting at the subconscious landscapes that Bi is keen to explore, an allegory about the auditory lives of frogs, who endanger themselves to predators when they sing louder for a mate, delivers an intriguing line that relates to Bi’s cinematic intentions: “The greater the fear, the greater the desire.” How much of one’s joy as a filmgoer is also our desire to feel dread? Bi seems to ask his audience. After all, as Kierkegaard wrote, “dread is a desire for what one dreads, a sympathetic antipathy.”3 Bi’s elaborate exercises in re-creating the frisson of dread are ultimately placed in the service of wonder, so that we might revive the last nerve receptor that hasn’t been fried by a TikTok reel. Foregrounding the primacy of awe and the landscape of dreams, Bi reframes this journey through the underworld by offering this shared ticket to the electrifying realm of fable.Meanwhile, the candle keeps burning. The next story/chapter enters more directly into the style of a modern Chinese folk tale, in which the Deliriant is a former monk called Mongrel. He rides in the back of a truck during a snowy winter in the 1960s, and is abandoned for the night at a temple. He suffers from a toothache. (The theme is taste.) After being advised by a voice coming from a broken Buddha statue, he knocks out the offending tooth and throws it over the wall. The human embodiment of the tooth returns, crawling over the wall in a surreal and (due, it seems, to a manipulation of film speed) slightly horrific moment, as the “Spirit of Bitterness” (played by Yongzhong Chen). To further emphasize that reality is perpetually shifting in this realm, during a conversation about what it means to be enlightened, the Spirit of Bitterness quotes from the sacred Buddhist text the Diamond Sutra: “All that has form is an illusion.”4 Bi also opened his second film, ye with a Diamond that to the of a is to a to a future and even to a Spirit of Bitterness the is the most in the the he his by him a (The would a taste.) 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