General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Shadowless Tower (白塔之光)

The Shadowless Tower (白塔之光) is a 2023 Chinese drama film directed and written by Zhang Lü, following a middle-aged Beijing food critic who reopens contact with the father who disappeared from his life more than 40 years earlier¹. The 144-minute film, in Mandarin and Cantonese, premiered in the main competition of the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival and later won four Tiantan Awards at the 13th Beijing International Film Festival²^•³. Its title refers to the White Pagoda of the Miaoying Temple in Beijing's Xicheng district, a structure famous for casting no visible shadow⁴.

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Zhang Lü, a Chinese director of Korean ethnicity; his thirteenth fictional feature⁴
Premiere	Main competition, 73rd Berlin International Film Festival, February 2023; Golden Bear nomination³
Runtime and languages	144 minutes; Mandarin and Cantonese²
Principal cast	Xin Baiqing (Gu Wentong), Huang Yao (Ouyang Wenhui), Tian Zhuangzhuang (Gu Yunlai)¹
Beijing festival results	Tiantan Awards for Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Cinematography, and Best Artistic Contribution; nominations for Best Film and Best Screenplay³
Chinese theatrical release	October 27, 2023⁵
Setting	The Xicheng district of Beijing, around the White Pagoda of the Miaoying Temple²

Spoilers

Story

Gu Wentong (Xin Baiqing) is a divorced former poet who now works as a restaurant critic in Beijing, raising a young daughter everyone calls Smiley; after her mother's death, his mother left him a small two-room apartment in Xicheng, the district dominated by the White Pagoda⁴. When Gu was five, his father was accused of molesting a woman on a bus, and Gu's mother threw him out of the house; the father has lived for years in a seaside town, biking the roughly three hundred miles to Beijing to catch glimpses of his son, daughter, and granddaughter⁴.

After the mother's death, Gu's brother-in-law Li Jun (Wang Hongwei) slips him the father's address and phone number, and Gu, encouraged by Ouyang Wenhui (Huang Yao), a young photographer he works with, decides to face his father and attempt to rebuild the relationship¹^•⁴. The film never states why the custody of Smiley is arranged as it is, and it leaves the question of the father's guilt or innocence open: by the time the possibility of his innocence arose, both his ex-wife and daughter were too set against him to consider it⁶.

The relationship between Gu and Ouyang stays deliberately unresolved. She is twenty-five and he is in his mid-forties, and she teases him by introducing him in public as either her boyfriend or her father, whichever makes him more uncomfortable⁴^•⁶. As one character puts it, "Too much politeness builds a wall between people"⁷.

The White Pagoda

The film is named for the White Pagoda, the historical stupa of the Miaoying Temple in Beijing's Xicheng district, built in 1279²^•⁶. Its builders designed with the light in mind, so the tower casts no visible shadow, or none that can be seen; according to legend, the shadow falls two thousand miles away in Tibet⁸^•⁴.

Zhang connected this quality to the film's characters. "Nobody cares too much about their shadow," he told the South China Morning Post. "But in certain emotional set-ups, you might start to pay attention to your shadow. Why? Because I think the shadow is a confirmation of the self."⁸ Critics read the pagoda as a metaphor for the protagonist's own sense of impermanence, a man wondering whether he will leave a meaningful impression⁷.

Production

Zhang Lü wrote the screenplay during the COVID-19 pandemic. Returning to China from South Korea, where he had been teaching, he spent two weeks in hotel quarantine in Guangzhou and used the confinement to write the script, having decided he wanted to write toward Beijing and the Baitasi (White Pagoda Temple) area of Xisi, where he had spent time in his youth⁵^•⁸. The film was shot in Beijing, largely around the White Pagoda Temple⁹.

Although Beijing is the city where Zhang has lived longest, having moved there in the 1980s, this was the first film in more than twenty years of filmmaking in which he anchored his camera entirely in the city⁵. He has said he could not approach Beijing as a tourist; the film had to be a story of Beijing people, with outsiders added in⁵. The film deliberately avoids fixing its time period: Zhang removed all calendars from the frame, leaving only incidental details, such as masks worn in the background during shooting, to date the story¹⁰.

The director

Zhang Lü is a third-generation ethnic Korean born in China. He was a novelist of some renown when he met the South Korean director and former novelist Lee Chang-dong at a writers' conference; at thirty-eight, while teaching Chinese Literature at Yanbian University, he took up a challenge from a Chinese director to make a film of his own, completing the short Eleven, which premiered in competition at Venice⁴. The Shadowless Tower is his thirteenth fictional feature⁴. His earlier films include Desert Dream (2007), Scenery (2013), and Yanagawa (2021), and many of his titles are named for places, including Yanagawa and Fukuoka⁸^•⁹.

Reception and awards

After its Berlin premiere in February 2023, the film won four Tiantan Awards at the 13th Beijing International Film Festival: Best Actor for Xin Baiqing, Best Supporting Actor for Tian Zhuangzhuang, Best Cinematography for Piao Songri, and Best Artistic Contribution for the film itself, alongside nominations for Best Film and Best Screenplay³. At the 10th Silk Road International Film Festival in late September 2023, it took Best Film and Best Cinematography⁵. At the 36th Golden Rooster Awards it was nominated for Best Cinematography (Piao Songri) and Best Actress (Huang Yao)³.

Critics emphasized the film's unhurried, oblique method. The Los Angeles Times described it as "a gently enigmatic character piece that resists telling you too much about its characters"¹¹. Writing in Variety, Jessica Kiang observed that the film reveals its arcs of change "not in dramatic showdowns or sudden revelations, but in ellipses, in the occasional mysterious fold in chronology, and most rewardingly, in the casual, unforced repetition of certain motifs"⁴.

A metatextual layer drew particular comment: Zhang cast Tian Zhuangzhuang, one of the noted Fifth Generation Chinese filmmakers whose career was derailed by government censorship after politically charged early work such as The Blue Kite (1993), as the father Gu Yunlai, a man living with a disgrace that may never have happened⁶.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2023 and 2024 › Titles O to Y

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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