Kogonada Asked Six Friends to Fly Themselves to Hong Kong. Three Weeks Later, They Left with a Movie

From his 2017 directorial debut “Columbus” to the acclaimed sci-fi drama “After Yang” to studio undertakings like “Pachinko” and “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” Kogonada‘s filmmaking has grown in scale with each subsequent project. But his new film “Zi,” which is premiering in the forward-thinking NEXT section of Sundance (where “Columbus” previously screened), saw the auteur working at the most intimate scale of his career.

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.

During a recent conversation with IndieWire, the seven collaborators explained how the unique project materialized.

“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.'”

Kogonada went on to explain that part of his motivation from burnout over the amount of logistics that go into large scale filmmaking. He and Loeb wanted to get away from endless meetings and back to the basics of their craft.

“That goes way back to a conversation Benjamin and I had while we were making ‘After Yang,'” Kogonada said. “We would eat ramen at the end of every day. And I think part of it, even at that level, we were like, ‘Oh, there has to be a way to make films that are not dictated by logistics.'”

Instead of worrying about securing every location and planning every shoot date, the two friends decided to focus on assembling a team that would be able to adapt to any challenge that came their way.

“The sort of logistics of putting this together is one thing, and then it’s the logistics of putting together a group of people who are able, capable, and willing to work in this way,” Loeb said. “I feel like putting together us as a group was the first stage of dealing with logistics and almost eyeing out each other’s expectations and making sure we were all in it for the same reasons. And making sure that even like our sound guy who was a Hong Kong local, it’s kind of like making sure that the expectations of filmmaking are set straight because we wanted to make this without any of those sort of limitations or constructs of filmmaking so that we could be free. If we wanted to photograph or film one scene for three hours, that was enough for us, if we had a good day.”

Three weeks of principal photography is fast, but certainly not unheard of for an independent film. But filmmakers often compensate for shorter shoots by spending more time on preproduction. The “Zi” team took the opposite approach, hitting the ground running after just a few days in the city.

“Pre-production is often more days than the actual production,” Kogonada said. “We landed and we walked around for three days and then we started shooting. And it was so liberating for Benjamin and I. Because we would talk about how many meetings you would have to have to just shoot in one of these locations. But sometimes we saw this great noodle shop and we’re like, ‘Oh, that’s our noodle shop.’ And then the next day, we’re shooting at this incredible space.”

The fact that such a spontaneous film even exists is a testament to how much the actors trust Kogonada, who had directed each of them in other projects. “When Kogonada asks you, ‘Do you want to come to Hong Kong and shoot something together?’ The answer is yes,” Jin said.

“When someone sees you, really, in that way and trusts you off the bat, it’s so much easier to just trust them. And so we’ve built that creatively and professionally. And then in the last decade, we’ve built that as friends,” Richardson added. “So I was just like, ‘I would probably fly myself to Hong Kong literally just to hang out with you.'”

Mao added that it was Kogonada’s extensive knowledge of cinema that initially forged her bond with him and led her to trust him on such an unconventional project.

“While I do find joy in that collaborative process on a more traditional movie set, something about working on ‘Zi’ that was really special was it started off with really just K and I talking about movies,” Mao said. “I remember we were on set and he was like, ‘Faint.’ I mean, the faint didn’t make it in. But he was like, ‘Faint like Juliette Binoche.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I know exactly what he’s talking about because we have this shared language that can just be a shortcut to his vision or what he wants in his head.'”

While not every movie can be filmed so quickly and cheaply, Kogonada and Loeb are already throwing around ideas for their next movie in the style of “Zi.” The director knows that it’s not easy to catch lightning in a bottle twice, but he hopes that this experiment is a step towards figuring out other ways for filmmakers to reclaim their independence.

“There’s something very unique to this project that I don’t think could be fully replicated,” he said. “But I think we’re hoping in this world that where independence in filmmaking is tougher to carve out even among smaller studios, I think that’s the pursuit is like, can we figure out a way to make a film in this spirit with this kind of creative freedom? So I would hope that there are models for this.”

“Zi” will premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.