A noir tale of love, vengeance and self-redemption. In a decaying phosphate fertiliser factory in Yunnan, Hu Xin, a boiler man haunted by the childhood drowning of a playmate, meets Li Yue—a girl who strangely resembles the one he lost. Drawn to her against his will and trapped between emotional longing and a haze of mistaken identity, Hu Xin gradually uncovers a dark secret: a recent disappearance in the factory seems to point directly to Li Yue…

Green Lake was shot in 2023, one year after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, and completed in 2025: it revisits those years through the lens of a phosphate fertiliser factory in Yunnan. It is a love story threaded with revenge and redemption, mixing noir tones with personal memory. The factory and its dormitories are the places of my childhood: my family worked there for generations. Today the plant has been revived by the role of phosphate in electric-vehicle batteries, but in my memory it remains oppressive—steel, furnaces, smoke, masks, and the constant threat of being fired. I was especially drawn to Li Yue: the film avoids explicit horror, yet her limping body and scars—traces of violence—hold the deepest wound; her father, present only as a name and ashes, ultimately becomes a symbol of the factory itself, brutal and inescapable. Many doubted this vision could be realised, but with a dedicated team we managed to give it form: beneath the cold, heavy images there is an emotional core on fire, like the flame in the boiler, which I hope reaches the viewer.