Feature Film Plan
Dreams, are Humanity’s Final Experiment.
To me, dreams and experiments share the same desire, which is to glance at what cannot be understood.
A dream is chaotic and emotional; an experiment is precise and repeatable. They both can fail easily.
When they merge, humanity gambles with its own nature.
This feature film encompasses three interconnected Worlds, each uniquely captivating and compelling, yet intricately linked to the others.
World ‘A’—The Photographer
Short Film FU QIN XIANG WAN (FALLING BIRDS AT DUSK)
concept (created by AI)
Jiaming is a young photographer. While waiting for his train home, he dozes off in a waiting hall and enters a dream constructed entirely from the faces of strangers he encountered. In this dream, he stages an imaginary family from the strangers, as if trying to repair a missing part of his own memory. But the boundaries between fiction and truth begin to dissolve. The figure of the “father” in his photographs slowly merges with his real one, a man who once abandoned him for another family. Within the dream, Jiaming finally faces what he has long refused to confront.
When he wakes, he realizes that he has not truly returned to reality. His consciousness has shifted into the body of a pigeon, whose eyes observe the same scenes from above: the photographer, the family, and the repetition of the same image. Himself, both the observer and the observed. In the end, he kills the pigeon with his own hands, symbolically killing the self that watches. What remains is not emotion but a cold, mechanical gaze, which is a transformation from human tenderness to pure observation.
Years have passed. The world has split into two distinct orders: those governed entirely by logic and who control the system, and those left behind, the poor, still driven by unrefined human instincts, whose unrest threatens the fragile balance of civilization. To prevent collapse, the ruling class establishes a new branch of science dedicated to studying human emotion. Among these researchers is Dr. Y, a brilliant yet emotionally detached scientist whose latest subject is Jiaming.
Jiaming’s dreams and fragmented memories intrigue him; they seem to contain something that science cannot fully grasp. Dr. Y begins reconstructing Jiaming’s dreams through data and algorithms, hoping to decode the essence of emotion itself. But the closer he gets, the more he loses distance. What begins as research turns into fascination, even desire. He and his wife later have a child, and he names the boy Jiaming, as if trying to recreate what he can never understand.
As the experiment continues, Dr. Y’s own emotional impulses begin to mirror those of the man he studies. His affair, his guilt, and his eventual failure all echo the photographer’s story from the dream world (World ‘A’). In fear of emotional chaos, he releases a pigeon into the system, commanding it to erase the dream, to seal everything under cold logic. (World ‘A’)
But as he watches the process unfold, he realizes the truth: the laboratory has always been a chamber inside his own mind. All along, he has not been studying Jiaming, but he has been dissecting himself.
World ‘B’—The Scientist
concept (created by AI)
World ‘C’—The Emotional Vessel
concept (created by AI)
In his youth, Jiaming’s experiences stripped him of all emotion. He left home and wandered across countries, making a living as a photographer. He became an observer, one who watches but no longer participates in feeling. At 40, he receives news of his father’s death. He decides to attend the funeral, yet beneath the gesture of ritual lies a hidden intention: to confirm whether his father had ever truly existed.
Inside the ruins of an abandoned laboratory, Jiaming discovers an old photograph. In that instant, he realizes that his father, the scientist, and the middle-aged man from his dream were all the same person. He had never truly seen his father’s face. The seal on his emotions is broken, and at this time, the past, present, and future converge. A mysterious impulse leads him to an Eastern European city, where the remnants of civilization hold the last traces of humanity’s search for emotion/dream and reason/science.
From that moment on, Jiaming becomes an emotional vessel, a being through which both divinity and animal instinct pass. He is at once a body of memory and a receiver of intimacy. Others project onto him their love, guilt, and sorrow. He hears the voices of their memories and sees fragments of their childhoods flicker before his eyes. The faces, hands, and unfallen tears around him form a landscape of suffering that time cannot dissolve.
In the end, he understands that to feel is to suffer endlessly, and that suffering is the price of being human. From the private dream of a photographer to the rational intervention of science, and finally to an unending contemplation of the human condition, this cycle of dream and experiment reveals the destructive cost of humanity’s pursuit of wholeness.
About the Film
Title: TBD
Type: Feature Film
Country: United States / China
Estimated Runtime: 90-100 minutes
Genre: Narrative, Experimental, Poetic Sci-Fi
Estimated Budget: 700,000 CNY / 100,000 USD
Status: Development
Built upon the short film FU QIN XIANG WAN (Falling Birds at Dusk).
