The first half of the shoot has wrapped in China for Lóngquán: The Dragon Spring, the feature-length directorial debut by Catalonian helmer Adrià Guxens, which tells the story of Junyi Sun, a Spanish dancer of Chinese heritage who has had scarcely any contact with his family’s home country – in fact, he has only visited China once, at the age of seven. Three decades later, and after he has shunned his roots for years, his mother convinces him to return, and that way, he can be reunited with his grandmother, who is now over 90 years old. This will be the moment for old wounds to resurface, and the artist will be forced to confront and reconsider his increasingly fragmented and confused identity.

“Lóngquán is a film about my friend Junyi. We both grew up in Tarragona – he as a person of colour, me as an LGBTI+ individual – and I think the fact that we felt like we didn’t fit the mould of ‘normality’ at that time, each in his own way, brought us closer,” states Guxens. “The story came up in a natural way, as the fruit of a years-long friendship. We felt like we wanted to convey that feeling of not belonging anywhere. And the fact is that, just like many other people from the Asian diaspora, Junyi is seen as a foreigner in Spain, whereas in China, he’s treated like just another Westerner.”

This is the second time that Guxens and Sun have worked together, as they previously attempted to reflect these contradictions in the short film A Distant Noise (2023), which was the original seed for this feature debut. Now, the writer, teacher and director, who trained at Barcelona’s ESCAC and was victorious at the 2020 Málaga Film Festival with his short I Don't Think It Is Going to Rain, has opted to double down on ambiguity, and so his film teeters between documentary and fiction, between realism and the fantastical, between the world of China and that of Spain, between the memories of that journey years ago and the immediacy of the present day. “I’ve never been attracted by certitude, because for me, film is an open process of searching and learning, not reproducing a prefabricated truth. That’s why we felt like we had to position ourselves in an uncomfortable place and embrace the inevitable ‘loss in translation’ on the creative and human side,” remarks the director.

The Lóngquán team is also fully aware that Spanish cinema still has much ground to explore in terms of its synergies with Chinese film, and very few Spanish movies have obtained the official label of being a co-production with the Asian country, which is surprising for Guxens. “The Chinese film market is the one that has the biggest turnover internationally, but nevertheless, in the West, we are still looking elsewhere. What’s more, countries such as the USA and France have spent years telling stories about people of different origins, whereas in Spain, we are still reluctant to put them at the centre of our movies, despite our society being very diverse,” he notes.

Lóngquán: The Dragon Spring, which took part in labs at Abycine Lanza and Bridging the Dragon, and is being produced by Anna Moragriega and Olga Doganoc (Pausa Dramàtica Films) alongside Diego Rodriguez (La Charito Films), is in search of funding to enable the team to finish off the final part of the shoot.