Dimitrios Kannavos: Congratulations on receiving the Best Proof of Concept for a Feature Film Award at the Cyprus International Film Festival. What does this recognition mean to you personally and professionally?

Weiyu Li (Renee) : It was a very encouraging recognition for me, especially because
Jane and Zhen was originally conceived as a longer story.
Its first title was First Impressions, and from the beginning,
I felt there was much more to the story than I could tell in a short film.

At the same time, I didn’t know whether the story would resonate
with audiences, and realistically, I didn’t yet have the resources
or experience to make it as a feature. So I decided to begin with
a short film.

That is why receiving the Best Proof of Concept for a Feature Film
Award meant something very specific to me. I never expected the
recognition to speak so directly to the film’s potential to become
something longer. It felt like a very meaningful encouragement to
keep exploring the story.

Dimitrios Kannavos: Could you tell us about “Jane and Zhen” and what inspired you to create this story?

Weiyu Li (Renee) : I made Jane and Zhen because I had questions I couldn’t answer.

I was thinking a lot about love and choice: Why can two people love
each other and still not be able to stay together? If we choose to
let someone go, does that mean the love has ended? And how much
choice do we really have in love and in life?

I didn’t want to make a film that simply answered those questions.
Instead, I imagined a young Chinese woman, Zhen, carrying them with
her into a dream, where she meets Jane Austen in Bath — not the
literary icon we know today, but Jane at the age of twenty-five.

What interested me was that this Jane might not have the answers
either. They are two young women separated by more than two hundred
years, meeting at moments in their lives when neither of them knows
what comes next. Jane and Zhen grew from that imagined encounter.

Dimitrios Kannavos: What was the central idea or message you wanted audiences to take away from “Jane and Zhen”?

Weiyu Li (Renee) : I never really thought about what I wanted the audience to take away
from the film. In a way, I was hoping to receive something from them.

The film asks questions about love, creation and eternity, but I don’t
think it gives definitive answers. What interested me was what
different people might find in it.

And that has actually been one of the most rewarding parts of showing
the film. A filmmaker in Madrid wrote about seeing eternal love in it,
and it made him think about the literary figure he had admired in his
own life. Some audience members told me they simply found the film
beautiful and fell in love with Bath. Others remembered someone they
had loved when they were young. One filmmaker saw
Zhuang Zhou Dreams of a Butterfly in it.

I love that these responses are so different. Perhaps I didn’t make
the film to give the audience one thing to take away. I made it with
questions, and the audience has been giving something back to me.

Dimitrios Kannavos: How did your creative journey develop from the initial idea to the completed short film and its presentation at an international festival?

Weiyu Li (Renee) : The journey really began in Bath. Jane Austen has always been one of
my literary idols, and towards the end of my studies, I was going
through a period of uncertainty in my own life. I went to Bath and
realised that it was the year of the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s
birth. Walking along streets she had once walked, I had a strange
feeling that I should meet her there, at that particular moment.

When I later tried to persuade my team to make the film as our
graduation project, I told them that we were about to graduate in the
UK, so we should make something that could only exist here, at this
particular time.

We were a Chinese team in Britain, in the year of Jane Austen’s
250th anniversary. Why not make a story in which a young Chinese
woman meets a twenty-five-year-old Jane Austen in a dream? That idea
brought the team together around the film.

The film then began to grow through the people I met. I became friends
with someone involved in providing costumes for the Jane Austen Centre,
who taught me a great deal about Regency clothing and helped us with
period costumes and props.

Later, I met Isabelle Dickey, the actress who would become my Jane.
In the first photograph I saw of her, she was wearing black
performance clothes, lying on the floor and laughing. She looked
nothing like the conventional image of Jane Austen, but I knew
immediately: that is my Jane.

After the film was completed, another journey began through
international film festivals. It has travelled to different countries
and met audiences from different cultural backgrounds, and I have
been fascinated by how differently people respond to it.

Receiving the Best Proof of Concept for a Feature Film Award in Cyprus
has become a particularly meaningful moment in that journey, especially
because the story was originally conceived as something larger than a
short film.

Dimitrios Kannavos: What were some of the greatest challenges you faced while making “Jane and Zhen”, and how did you overcome them?

Weiyu Li (Renee) : One of the biggest challenges was time. We had only three days to shoot
the film, with many different locations within Bath. Moving the cast,
crew and equipment from one location to another through the city took
much longer than I had expected.

After the first day, we realised that the pace simply wasn’t going to
work. So for the second and third days, we planned the shooting schedule
much more precisely and tried to make every move between locations as
efficient as possible.

Even then, by the third day we were still running out of time, and I
had to make some difficult decisions and cut several shots I had
originally planned.

“When you realise you cannot keep everything you imagined, you have
to know what is essential to the film — and protect that first.”

Dimitrios Kannavos: Your film brings together elements of different cultural perspectives. How important is cultural diversity and international storytelling in your work?

Weiyu Li (Renee) :I never consciously decided that I wanted to make a cross-cultural
film. I was already standing in a cross-cultural position, so perhaps
it would have been impossible for me to make a film that wasn’t
cross-cultural.

At the same time, I think there are certain fundamental questions —
about love, loss, choice, time — where human emotions can meet across
cultures.

When I write a story, my first question is not whether it can travel
internationally. I ask whether it can move me. Whether it can move
other people, and whether it can cross cultures, is something I can
only begin to discover afterwards.

With Jane and Zhen, that discovery began during the making of
the film. I first shared the script with the Chinese members of my
team, and they found something in it that moved them. Then I showed it
to an older British friend who was helping us with the period costumes,
and she connected with it too.

Once the film was finished, I became curious to see how this quite
literary and culturally specific film would travel in very different
places. So I submitted it to festivals across a wide range of cultural
contexts — including the UK, the US, South Korea, Türkiye, Greece and
countries in Africa.

For me, that is what international storytelling has come to mean:
beginning with something I genuinely feel, and then allowing the film
to travel and discovering where, and with whom, it finds a connection.

Dimitrios Kannavos: How did your experience at the Cyprus International Film Festival influence your perspective as a filmmaker?

Weiyu Li (Renee) : What stayed with me most was actually Cyprus itself. I came to Cyprus
because of a film festival, but while I was there, I began to think
about Cyprus itself as a place for filmmaking.

I visited museums and small galleries, and became fascinated by how
much history, art and how many stories seem to exist within such a
small place.

The festival also brought people into my life whom I would probably
never have met otherwise. I met filmmakers from very different places
and backgrounds, and some of them have become friends.

“I went to Cyprus to show a film, and left thinking that Cyprus itself
was somewhere I would genuinely like to make a film one day.”

Dimitrios Kannavos: Do you see “Jane and Zhen” developing into a full-length feature film, and what would you like to explore further in the story?

Weiyu Li (Renee) : Yes. In fact, the story was originally conceived as a feature film,
under the title First Impressions, and I still hope to develop
it in that direction.

One of the things I would most like to explore is a more cinematic way
of telling the story. The short film relies quite heavily on dialogue,
partly because so much had to be compressed into fifteen minutes.

But dialogue is a literary tool. Cinema can tell stories through light
and shadow, sound, movement, space and time. With a feature, I would
like to give the story more room to breathe through those elements.

So for me, developing Jane and Zhen into
First Impressions would not simply mean making the same story
longer. It would mean finding a fuller cinematic form for the story
that was there from the beginning.

Dimitrios Kannavos: As a filmmaker working in an increasingly international industry, what opportunities and challenges do you see for emerging filmmakers today?

Weiyu Li (Renee) :I think one of the greatest opportunities is that a film can now travel
much further than the filmmaker’s own immediate world.

When we finished Jane and Zhen, I didn’t have a large
international network. But the film began travelling to festivals,
and through it I met filmmakers, producers and audiences whom I would
probably never have encountered otherwise.

Sometimes your work can enter a room before you do. A small film can
begin conversations, create friendships and open possibilities for
future collaborations across countries.

But I have also discovered something very practical this year:
a film can travel more easily than the filmmaker can.

Attending international festivals takes both time and money, and
sometimes several opportunities happen at the same time. For an
emerging filmmaker, these are real decisions.

Perhaps that is also part of working internationally: not only finding
opportunities for your work to travel, but deciding when and where
you need to travel with it.

Dimitrios Kannavos: What are your plans for the future, and is there a particular story or film project you are currently dreaming of bringing to audiences around the world?

Weiyu Li (Renee) : My current dream project is First Impressions, the feature film
that Jane and Zhen originally grew from. I hope to develop it
into a fantasy feature that can balance artistic expression with the
possibilities of a wider theatrical audience.

I would love to direct a film for the cinema one day, so this project
is very close to that dream. But I know that getting there will take
time.

I want to give myself the space to develop the screenplay properly,
while also beginning to look for the right investment and collaborators
to make it possible.

I also want to remain open to feedback throughout that process. If I
want the film to reach a wider audience and succeed commercially, I
don’t think I can develop it entirely in isolation.

So my hope is not simply to make First Impressions longer or
bigger. I would like to see whether it can become a fantasy film that
is both personally meaningful to me and genuinely engaging to an
audience — and, hopefully, the film that allows me to realise my dream
of directing for the big screen.