Gu You's 'First Taste of Loneliness' Wins Double at Busan

By Grace Kim

Director Gu You's The First Taste of Loneliness premiered in the main competition of the 2026 Busan International Film Festival and left with two awards: Zhou Xun won Best Actor and Li Danfeng received the Busan Award for Artistic Contribution for sound design. The film is the third entry in a trilogy that began with Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (2019), which screened at Cannes, and continued with Dwelling by the West Lake (2023).

The story follows three generations of women confronting grief. Zhou Xun plays Jiang Yue, a divorced mother who has just lost a design job and returns home to help her mother Luna (Xi Meijuan) care for her ailing husband. Yue's daughter Moon (Wang Shengdi), a high school student, struggles to adapt to a life organized around her grandfather's illness. Speaking at Busan, Gu described the film as "the last 100 days leading up to the grandfather's passing," adding: "The camera is, in a sense, like his soul."

How do scroll paintings become a shooting method?

All three of Gu's films draw on Shanshui painting, an ancient Chinese landscape art form. Working with Japanese cinematographer Mikiya Takimoto, Gu set two firm rules on set. First, the camera always moves from right to left, mimicking how old scrolls were unrolled. Second, a single shot must combine different settings and locations, recreating the way scrolls show transitions of space and time.

The result is a visual grammar where past, present and future mix within one frame. Gu pointed to a shot at a mountain shrine that holds several timelines at once. "At one spot, you might see all four seasons," he said, describing how a Shanshui painting offers a bird's-eye view that "flies over time and space" — like traveling in a hot air balloon.

One restaurant scene pushes the idea furthest. Jiang Yue and Luna meet Mr. Xu and his family; we see Xu washing his hands in the bathroom while the soundtrack plays him introducing his family inside the restaurant, then hear him announce he is going to the men's room. Gu said he wanted to "combine the entire scene in one space, regardless of time."

What do the restrictions change for filmmaking?

For Gu, the rules are a response to the AI era. Because anyone can now access every filmmaking method, there is no longer an "incorrect" style, he argued. The constraints were his way to "restrict or return to a more honest way of shooting, not only for Chinese films, but for films of all cultures."

The production had practical constraints too. Gu works with actors who are very famous in China, and bystanders get excited when they appear in public. The crew rehearsed at night with nobody around, mapping the actors' routes and camera positions. "When you get to the shoot, you get one take, one chance," he said. The night park scene — where Luna dances with Xu and, left alone, waltzes into tears — used hidden cameras and cast extras to match angles. If the first take failed, the production had to move locations before onlookers caught on.

The film's title comes from a Teresa Teng song Gu heard as a child without understanding it. "Now I'm older, I've experienced loss in my life, and I have a deeper understanding of the meaning of loneliness," he said. He designed the ending around that song before shooting began, then built the story toward it. A quieter third plot line hides in the film: Jiang Yue finds her father's wish list, which included a goal of doing one kind act a day. Gu said the point is not external kindness but expressing "more love to your family and to those who are still living."

The director, drawing on Buddhist thought — "hardship is enlightenment" — said he hopes the ending gives "a taste of loneliness" to five people: the three women, the grandfather, and, most importantly, the audience.