The Wild Goose Lake

The Wild Goose Lake (南方车站的聚会, literally "A Rendezvous at the Station in the South") is a 2019 Chinese-French crime film written and directed by Diao Yinan, his fourth feature, set in the streets, lakes, and urban villages of Wuhan. It stars Hu Ge as a small-time gang boss who accidentally kills a police officer and schemes to turn the bounty on his own head into a final gift for his family, with Gwei Lun-mei, Liao Fan, Wan Qian, and Huang Jue in supporting roles.^{1 • 2}

Origins and real events

Diao Yinan said the story began as a daydream: a poor person's only path to a large sum of money is to be wanted by the police, so that the bounty on his head becomes his fortune.¹² Two years later a real case gave the idea its shape: a fugitive from northeastern China who killed a police officer and fled into the mountains saw his own wanted notice offering 100,000 yuan and decided to leave the money to his family, asking relatives to tie him up and hand him to the authorities.¹² A second inspiration was a 1980s Xi'an bandit who escaped before execution and hid for two years in a zoo, sleeping beside an elephant.¹²

The film's events, including the "Congress of the Thieves" where criminals are given a tutorial on stealing motorbikes, all had sources in real life, according to the director. The fugitive Zhou Zenong corresponds to the real criminal Zhou Kehua, who was killed by police in the summer of 2012 after a series of armed robberies; his girlfriend was epileptic, as Zhou Zenong's wife is in the film.¹ The script took two years to write, and producer Shen Yang estimated the cost at 100 million yuan, a figure that surprised Diao.¹²

Production

Shooting in Wuhan. The film was shot on location in Wuhan from April 28 to September 30, 2018, a 156-day schedule, followed by roughly seven months of post-production.^{7 • 13} Because the story is set around 2009, all of the more than 80 sets and locations were aged for the period.⁵ About 85% of the film takes place at night, and the largest crowd scenes required more than 2,000 extras, with one sequence using 3,000 extras simultaneously, all in the hot, rainy, short-nighted southern summer.^{5 • 13}

Diao called the abundance of night scenes the greatest difficulty, since lighting them demanded both physical stamina and tight time control and put heavy pressure on the camera department.⁵ He described the crew as "light archaeologists" brushing dust off the air to keep the light in its original state, and said the flashing neon matched the atmosphere of the city's edge at night.¹⁴ The entire cast performed in the Wuhan dialect, and residents of a tongziling (old tenement) building where the crew shot for a week, complaining about the late-night noise, appear in the film along with their complaint.^{15 • 12}

Diao shoots all his films in script order, which the producers said benefits the actors' emotional continuity but is a challenge for production planning; the film used a completion guarantee, and the shoot finished exactly on schedule.^{13 • 7} After Black Coal, Thin Ice won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2014, financiers gave Diao decision rights over shooting, casting, and editing; he noted that on the earlier film the producers had wanted at least 1,500 shots for a commercial film, negotiated down to 800, while the final cut had only about 500.¹²

Style and reception

The film is a stylized neo-noir, drenched in reds and blues and neon, that critics read as Diao's hybrid of genre thriller and art film.^{16 • 1} Reviewers highlighted its set pieces: a nighttime gang rumble, a firefight in which gunshots briefly light up a tiger's face, police in glowing sneakers, and an umbrella killing.^{11 • 17} The New York Review of Books noted the film's blend of social criticism with the noir form, and its rare use of an entire cast speaking the Wuhan dialect with the city's real locations.¹

At Cannes it was the only Chinese-language title in official competition.⁴ It later played the 57th New York Film Festival in September and October 2019.¹⁶ On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 91% approval from 81 reviews, with a critics consensus calling it "smart and stylish"; Metacritic assigned a score of 76, indicating generally favorable reviews.^{9 • 10}

Commercial performance. The film opened in China on December 6, 2019 and its box office approached 200 million yuan.^{5 • 6} Producer Shen Yang described it as an independent production moving toward industrialized filmmaking.⁶ In the United States, Film Movement released it in limited theaters on March 6, 2020, with streaming from July 5, 2020; the US gross was $12.6 thousand, a release that coincided with early COVID-19 theater closures.⁹

References

1. Jiwei Xiao (2020). Into the Uncharted Zone: Diao Yinan's 'The Wild Goose Lake'. The New York Review of Books.
2. The Wild Goose Lake, International Film Festival Rotterdam 2020
3. Cannes 2019: Diao Yinan and Li Li interview, YouTube (NetEase Entertainment)
4. Clarence Tsui (2019). Cannes 2019: The Wild Goose Lake film review. South China Morning Post.
5. 《南方车站的聚会》上映 除了讲故事还想给观众个世界. 人民网传媒.
6. “南方车站”票房近2亿，看独立制作影片如何迈向工业化. 第一财经.
7. 专访和力辰光李力：《南方车站的聚会》创作手册. 界面新闻.
8. Tomris Laffly (2020). The Wild Goose Lake movie review. RogerEbert.com.
9. The Wild Goose Lake, Rotten Tomatoes
10. The Wild Goose Lake critic reviews, Metacritic
11. Peter Bradshaw (2019). The Wild Goose Lake review. The Guardian.
12. 刁亦男说“南方车站”：女性结盟，把男人留在暗夜. 南方周末.
13. 《南方車站的聚會》制片人：選胡歌沒考慮過流量. 人民网.
14. 《南方车站的聚会》发制作特辑 刁亦男率“灯光考古者”光影造梦. 中国电影报.
15. 中国电影报专访导演刁亦男 (2019-12-11).
16. The Wild Goose Lake, 57th New York Film Festival, Film at Lincoln Center
17. Edwin Arnaudin. The Wild Goose Lake review. Asheville Movies.

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

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