In Conversation: ‘A Bear Remembers’ Directors Zhang and Knight

by Karen Reyes

London-based directing duo Zhang & Knight (Linden Feng and Hannah Palumbo) debuted their Oscar-qualifying narrative short film, A Bear Remembers, earlier this year. This hauntingly lyrical story follows Peter (Lewis Cornay), a young boy investigating a strange, echoing sound in the valley of Greyhill. His curiosity leads him to Ebba (Anna Calder-Marshall) who revisits her childhood memory of a bear spirit that brings forth a powerful and legendary connection. Fitting such a beautiful, touching story into 20 minutes is no easy feat, but Zhang & Knight effectively captured the emotional journey of memory. The duo shared insight into the filming process and the origin of the story in A Bear Remembers.

How did you get your start as a directing duo?

KNIGHT: Well, we’ve been working together for just over 10 years now. We met at university and really clicked in a very big way creatively there. And then after university we went straight into making music videos, so our background is music videos and commercials and that’s kind of how we honed and learned our craft and got to play in very different visual mediums. I think some of that comes through into Bear, but it’s been a very big pivot to suddenly go to narrative which is what we always wanted to do. I think we just wanted the experience under our belt before we went into making narrative work properly.

ZHANG: And I would say the forging of our friendship really was over cinema and film. We really fell in love with a lot of 5th generation filmmakers from China in the ‘80s, like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige and a lot of Japanese cinema. Films like Kwaidan and, from Thailand, [Director] Apichatpong [Weerasethakul]. So we became very obsessed with similar cinema and that really became a deep bonding experience. But for many years we were like, “Okay, we will make films but we just gotta get good at some craft stuff first and then we’ll make a film.” 

Were narrative films always the goal? Do you eventually want to make feature films?

KNIGHT: I think from day one we always wanted to do feature films, ultimately. I think that’s always been there. It’s our big, big goal as filmmakers. Not to say that the short stuff isn’t fun in a different way. It’s certainly fun doing things like music videos and things which just play in one medium, which is—they’re purely a visual medium. But like Linden was saying, our first love was always narrative cinema and arthouse cinema. That’s what we’ve always wanted to do. 

ZHANG: Hannah kind of touched on this, but the music videos in particular have really informed our craft when it comes to storytelling. Because, I think, when you’re making a music video, you have the track—it’s three and a half minutes long or however long—and you are really beholden to that. That’s kind of your script, I guess, because what the music is doing, that is informing what you can do officially. What you can achieve tonally. We try and do what we can, but we’re really . . . I won’t say limited, but it’s really defined by the song. And so when we now approach our storytelling for narrative, we’re so like, “I think this part would be a dance or this part would be music, this would be a song.” And that actually often comes first. 

With A Bear Remembers, not to give a spoiler, but there’s a very important dance later in the film and I think that was one of the first things we wrote in the script. And maybe that’s kind of as a result of coming from a medium where [we’re] having to think first of all the other things which aren’t dialogue.

How is directing a short film a different process from directing a music video?

KNIGHT: I think it was a big adjustment in a way because having long dialogue scenes for the first time, there was a big need to rehearse everything with the actors. And you have to cover off a certain amount of shots which takes a certain amount of time because you have to run through the whole scene. So for the dialogue, we deliberately went for a directing style which was quite minimalistic because, for us, we like that style of directing but also it gives more time to focus on the performances and things like that. 

Apart from those scenes I would say it’s remarkably similar to doing a music video. I think that’s partially just our style, and partially I think we’re quite perfectionistic when it comes to our music videos. We’re not bashing through multiple set-ups. We will film a close-up of a teapot for an hour. So in some ways, there were things we had to spend more time on but other things felt very similar.

ZHANG: I would say, Hannah is always amazing, it’s why I work with her. She’s my best friend but also she’s a bit of a genius. When we first started the process she was like, “Right, we’ve never done this and we need this to be good because we’re putting a lot of time and love into this,” and kind of made us go back to school. Like I said, we love a lot of Asian cinema, we love Andrei Tarkovsky. A lot of what we like is really visual and doesn’t have much dialogue. And Hannah’s like, “That’s not where we’re going to learn first and foremost how to do this stuff.” So we started going back through the Bergmans and Kieślowski, the Polish filmmaker—stuff that is also visual and really beautiful, but has a real grounding in a shot reverse shot scene and how you make a good one versus a not-so-good one. 

And Hannah made these crazy documents, they were literally a sort of syllabus for us to study and we’d watch stuff and we’d discuss it. We never want to just assume we know. I think that’s the beauty of having a duo, is the back and forth and getting to teach each other. So that was kind of a humbling process, like going back to square one and being like, “Let’s learn how to do this.”

The smaller aspect ratio of the film and the dream-like, grainy quality—is this a style you choose based on the story you want to tell or is it a style you want to use for all of your work?

ZHANG: A lot of the cinema we love shoots in 4:3. I think with this, we wanted it to feel archival. We wanted it to feel like even though it’s a modern day story, it’s a story of spirits and we wanted it to feel a bit out of time. Is this a story in 2024, 2025 or is this a story from 60 years ago? And so I think 4:3 instantly conjures a period of history and makes things have that kind of aged quality to them—connecting it through to the film’s theme of memory—without us having to actually shoot a period piece or something. We also have this sense of, you’re hearing a noise in the whole film that’s driving the story forward and we loved the idea [that] you’re hearing a noise but your field of view is very truncated or shrunk by the 4:3. We’re in these big landscapes with huge hills, but you can just see a tiny part of it. And it’s forcing your senses to reach outwards and engage with other parts of the film, not just the visuals and the landscape.

Where did the idea for the story of A Bear Remembers come from?

KNIGHT: When you’re working in a duo, the kind of work you want to be making is the work that falls in the intersection between the two of your experiences and things that really interest you. And I think for a long time we’ve been interested in making films about cultural erasure for different reasons. Lind’s half Chinese half English but grew up in rural Wales where, yeah, no one else looked like you. And my mother was a Turkish __immigrant who came over to the UK and was placed in the UK foster system and was completely divorced from her culture, so we both kind of have that story in our backgrounds in some way. 

I think that was always something that we really wanted to explore in a film. And I think when the idea came up, we had just been talking about that topic and we love folklore, we love animation. We love stuff like Studio Ghibli and the allegorical way that folktales and creatures and costumes can be used to tell quite complex stories in a way that’s accessible and interpretable to a lot of people. And by spending loads and loads of time in both of those places, it sort of merged one day. It’s not based on anything particularly but it’s got lots of bits and pieces of lots of different research in there over time.

I really enjoyed the progression of emotions in the film: It started off a bit eerie with the interview clips and then slowly developed into something that felt really personal and emotional and beautiful. Was there anything you hoped people would take from the film—a reaction or something else?

ZHANG: I think we knew how we wanted people to leave the film. We knew the feeling. I guess people can make their minds up about what the feeling is, but we were really clear that we knew where we wanted to get emotionally. We weren’t necessarily so fast at each stage where we were like, “In the opening, this is how we want to be,” but we just knew what the closing sentiment was. And I think in a 20-minute film, we were like, “We just gotta do what we gotta do to get people there.” At first, maybe it’s a bit mysterious or you don’t fully know what’s going on but we were like, if they hang on, they’ll get to the second half and be like, “What is this film?” in a good way. 

For the interview stuff, we were trying to find a way of establishing plot information. There’s an English filmmaker called Peter Greenaway. He used to make mockumentaries about very strange things. Or sometimes documentaries but they felt like mockumentaries because they’re so surreal. He made one about people being struck by lightning which was actually a real thing. They were all people who had been struck by lightning, but they delivered it in this really deadpan way and you couldn’t tell if it was almost like a prank or if it was a real documentary. And we were like, “Can we open in a way that gets people afterwards to Google this? Like, is this a real noise? Is this a real thing?”

KNIGHT: And I think the mystery aspect of the opening felt like a very good way of getting people to the second half. Because without that, it’s such a complex topic that we had to get people to that scene. So that was why we pivoted that story that way and kind of leant into the eeriness and the mystery elements of it as much as we could in the filmmaking as well. 

You have such incredible establishing shots of the landscape and the village itself. What were the filming locations like?

KNIGHT: We got so lucky, I felt. We filmed it in South Wales, which does get shot a lot for different BBC dramas and loads of stuff in the UK, but for some reason this completely amazing [street]—that one street where you’ve got that huge cliff face of the hills behind it—I just don’t think has been over-shot. We did a very extensive recce process and we’re lucky that Linden grew up in the area and also our production manager grew up in the area and spent a long time up there with her family, driving around trying to find different places. But it was such an incredible location, it’s just not a place people would look necessarily to do that much filming. Or maybe it’s in loads of stuff and I haven’t realized.

ZHANG: I think people film it a lot—there’s a forest kind of near there which is in Star Wars and Doctor Who and a load of Marvel stuff. It’s a beautiful, mythic part of the world so, like Hannah says, it gets shot all the time but we specifically knew it was a street and a hill behind it and that was the shot. So it was just driving through every small town in the Welsh valleys. Because there are hills everywhere and there are towns everywhere but it’s like, where’s the shot? Where’s the composition that also works in 4:3? And we saw it and we were like, “It is here! There is nowhere else it could be, this is perfect.” 

KNIGHT: And I liked that we filmed on the actual hill that is behind it. We really did, like, it’s not that cheated. It’s pretty much all as is. It’s kind of an amazing place.

Was it hard to get up to that hill? How did transporting everything work?

KNIGHT: I have to say, I think production really suffered on that one. It was very, very difficult. I think also compounded by the fact that we had an older actress who struggled a little bit on the terrain and then this monstrous, like, 400 pounds of bear that’s struggling its way up the hill which is impossible to walk in. You’re blind, you can’t see where your feet are being placed. So in the end I think we had to get a tractor. We were lucky there was good road access. You don’t see it in the film but there’s a road basically right by where we were filming, so we’d drive everyone up there and then we’d put the bear and Ebba in the tractor and tractor them over. But then the bear couldn’t really fit in the tractor so the bear had to walk across the hills but with an entourage of people because it was blind. It was tough.

ZHANG: It got heavier and heavier as well because it rained a lot. You don’t see it in the film [ . . . ] but it was incredibly wet, very cold and the bear is made largely of wool, like sheep’s wool, so every minute of rain increases the weight of the bear. And poor Rhianna, the woman inside the bear suit, was getting more and more weighed down. At one point we were like, “Rhianna, you wanna take off the bear suit to have a rest?” And she was like, “Guys, if I take off the suit, I’m never putting it on again. We just gotta go. We just gotta shoot this.” And with Annie, our older actress, it was very stressful. She was so cold, delivering these beautiful performances and then in between takes just trembling with cold. It was tough.

At least you know it was worth it because it all looks amazing in the film! How long did you film? Did you have to make that trek multiple times?

KNIGHT: We had quite a generous shoot window. It was still tough, it was very overpacked. But it was two and a half days, which—it was like a cheeky half day, like not a proper half day.

ZHANG: Wait, three and a half or two and a half?

KNIGHT: I think it was two and a half.

ZHANG: Oh, okay. Maybe.

KNIGHT: I’m pretty sure it was two and a half. I’ve blocked it out. [laughs] Yeah, because we would have filmed—

ZHANG: No, no because community center was one day—

KNIGHT: Oh, maybe it was three and a half.

ZHANG: It was three and a half days. But the half day was getting drone footage and stuff.

KNIGHT: But it wasn’t like we were running and bashing out that end scene. That end scene was shot over two days. And I think me and Linden had basically been living in that valley for the week preceding it so we’d go there ahead of the shoot and we’d have these rocks—because it’s just this massive hill, I don’t know [ . . . ] how you’re going to mark where you want the camera to go. But we marked out all the shots with these little piles of rocks beforehand so it was like, as soon as we got to location we could just—dolly goes here, camera goes here, this goes here. So it was quite efficient but it was tough to get it all done in the time for sure. But very fun.

ZHANG: I think because we recced it so much, that saved the most time because, like Hannah said, we knew exactly where we wanted stuff to go. Normally, on a music video or commercial we’ll do two recces. You’ll do an initial scout where you’re just looking, could this work? And then you’ll do a tech recce with the full crew where all the heads of department come [ . . . ] And actually, Hannah and I, because we’re over preparers, we went maybe five or six times to that hill over several weeks. That started to then affect the script. We started writing the wind turbines into the script because they’re everywhere. We can’t shoot around them so they should be part of the story. And because the color of the hill is kind of grey because of the gravel and stone that is exposed there, we renamed the town to Greyhill because we were like, that’s what you’d call it. It’s a grey hill. So it was a lovely process of getting to know the area and bringing it into the mythology of the film. 

It’s such a beautiful film and Ebba’s performance is so emotional. You really nailed the feeling of nostalgia and memory. Is there anything else about the film you wanted to share?

ZHANG: Like Hannah said, this isn’t a real myth, the bear. But it is a kind of patchwork of lots of English mythology and European mythology. And early on we questioned, should this be a bear? Because we straight away were like, it’s a bear and we had the name very early on, A Bear Remembers. And then we [ . . . ] kind of interrogated that decision. A bear just felt so perfect because we used to have bears in the British Isles. Now we don’t, they were hunted to extinction a long time ago, but they’re still such a part of our cultural identity. We have so many pubs, The Bear, The Bear and Swan, you know, the word “bear” appears so many times in our place names and in our heraldry. A lot of noble families have bears as their coat of arms. We have Winnie the Pooh—

KNIGHT: Paddington!

ZHANG: Paddington! We have lots of famous bears but we have no actual bears. And I think the more we thought about it, the more we were like, aw, it’s actually so sad. It is an animal which is of these isles but at the same time, it’s nowhere to be found. And so that kind of confirmed, or reaffirmed, the decision for us. So I think it became very resonant that it was a bear. We like to sort of go with things and then unpick them between us like, “Is this the right choice?” We never really trust our instincts but that one was like, yes, this instinct is the right thing to do.