Zhou Dijun is a young director from the Greater Bay Area. He has been working as a professional director since 2013, specializing in delicate emotions, close to the style of A24’s works, and has filmed a number of network share dramas, short films for film festivals, music videos and promotional videos. He is the director & scriptwriter of the 2023 romantic fantasy drama “Miss Bai”. Among his short films, one of the most interesting is “Hibernator“, which is inspired from the “Great Depression” and hibernators from “The Three-Body Problem: The Dark Forest”.
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The story takes place in the The Three Body Problem universe, with humanity facing an unprecedented crisis and the people in charge deciding to use hibernation technology to send their most distinguished military officers into the future. The ones who woke a century later were called Hibernators.
The film begins in rather claustrophobic fashion, in intense monochrome, with close ups of an astronaut in an elevator and his intense breathing adding to the tension. The next scene takes place outside, in calmer fashion, and a rather appealing light filling the screen, as the person in the spacesuit, who seems to be a woman, is walking in an area that seems destroyed and devoid of people. An electronic assistant informs her of what has happened there, and the impact to the environment intense agriculture had. Population begun to plummet, shrinking into 3.5 billion from 8.5 it was before.
The assistant then tells the woman of her destination, a village, but before she gets there, someone throws a stone at her. It turns out it is a girl wearing a schoolgirl suit and a mask, while it is soon revealed she is not on her own.
The combination of sound and image here is excellent, with Zhou Dijun picking up the tempo and slowing it down a number of times, thus generating a very appealing sense of agony and disorientation about what is happening. The combination of the dystopian setting, the sci-fi premises, and the anime-like mystery girl work excellently here, additionally highlighting the competent job done in the editing.
Expectedly, at 7 minutes, Zhou Dijun did not have the time to tell a full story, but as a beginning of something that will be expanded, as the “to be continued” message in the end highlights, the short definitely works. Furthermore, the quality of the audiovisual aspect is definitely much higher than what we usually see in such films, although the use of music could have been toned down a bit.
In the end, “Hibernator” highlights Zhou Dijun’s prowess in sci-fi/fantasy filmmaking, and I could definitely see him directing a feature in the category in the future, since he definitely has the skills for it.
