Lei Lei’s Hybrid Doc ‘Vertigo Garden,’ About a Botanist’s AI-Replicated Memories, Lands at Asian Shadows Ahead of IDFA Bow (EXCLUSIVE)

Boutique sales company Asian Shadows has acquired “Vertigo Garden,” the new feature from Chinese filmmaker and animation artist Lei Lei, ahead of its world premiere in the Envision Competition at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA).

This is Lei’s second feature. IDFA has also nominated it for the Beeld en Geluid IDFA ReFrame Award, which honors creative work with archival material.

“Vertigo Garden” unfolds at the Lushan Botanical Garden and follows the life of its botanist. His body is found in the snow and ice at the top of Lushan Mountain, with both body and brain intact. Scientists study the brain, use AI to reproduce his memories and set them loose in a digital world. Through conversation, the film pieces together the botanist’s storied bond with the metasequoia tree and his efforts to communicate with the planet’s memories through these ancient trees.

Lei uses the metasequoia to probe how memory, life and the planet connect, combining documentary, 3D animation and experimental techniques.

“I believe that Asian Shadows and its team truly love the film. They will treat this film like their own child and promote it to meet audiences around the world, which for me goes beyond what is called a business partnership,” Lei said.

In a director’s statement, Lei wrote that he started filming at the garden, in his hometown, with an 8mm camera in 2024, making long-term field recordings there. He credited Chris Marker’s “Sans Soleil” (1983) as the inspiration for the screenplay, and the film uses video letters to stage an imagined correspondence between the filmmaker and the botanist. The statement also set out plans to 3D-scan metasequoia fossils, trunks and the garden’s greenhouse, then move through the digital models with a virtual camera to create effects that resemble a video game. Elsewhere, Lei described training AI to generate footage of the same location again and again, cutting the results into a flickering effect he likened to the work of artist Rose Lowder.

Lei wrote and produced the film with Chai Mi. It is produced by See-Ray Studio Production, the animation and visual art company Lei founded.

Maria A. Ruggieri, head of sales and acquisitions at Asian Shadows, called Lei a singular voice among Chinese filmmakers without any doubt. “His talent as an animator, his search for new representations of China, his love and care for the recreation of lost emotions and history are perfectly assembled one more time in ‘Vertigo Garden,'” she said.

Born in Nanchang, Lei earned a master’s degree in animation from Tsinghua University. He went on to teach experimental animation at CalArts Film & Video School and has been a professor at Tsinghua’s Arts and Design Academy since 2022. His short “Missing One Player” won a Prix Ars Electronica and a Silver Dove at DOK Leipzig in 2015.

His mid-length documentary “Breathless Animals” debuted in the Berlinale Forum in 2019 and was named best mid-length documentary at Iran’s Cinéma Vérité. His first animated feature, “Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish,” premiered in the Tiger Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2022.

Founded in 2014, Asian Shadows sells Asian films by Asian directors worldwide. Its recent titles include Eddie Cahyono’s “Ibuku,” which won the Busan Award Special Jury Prize at this year’s Busan International Film Festival, and “The Seoul Guardians,” directed by Kim Jong-woo, Kim Shin-wan and Cho Chul-young, which picked up a Netpac Award special mention in Rotterdam. The company’s catalog also includes Wang Bing’s “Man in Black,” Soda Kazuhiro’s “The Cats of Gokogu Shrine” and Mouly Surya’s “This City Is a Battlefield.”

“Vertigo Garden” is the third Lei film handled internationally by the company, after “Breathless Animals” and “Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish.”