2025 Student Academy Award Winners Series Part 1: Kubrick, Like I Love You

Welcome to our Student Academy Award Series. We are very excited to be back for a third year highlighting and celebrating the Student Academy Winners leading up to the medal ceremony on October 6th. We kick things off with Live Action winner Kubrick, Live I Love You, directed by Zefan Wang.

Kubrick, Like I Love You, dir. Zefan Wang

Fei is facing a problem that would horrify any cinephile. “My girlfriend doesn’t know who Kubrick is!” (Or Renoir, or Bergman, or Tarkovsky, or…) When he showed her the 149-minute 2001: A Space Odyssey, he complains, she slept for 5 hours. Their interests are so different, but his girlfriend Lou, at least, thinks they get along so well. She’s a brashly extroverted online influencer, and he’s a quiet indoor kid cinephile—not to mention “she hit me in the face and said I’m not a man” being in Fei’s list of “cons.” Fei feels their relationship coming to an end, but every time he tries to break up with Lou, he ends up blurting out “I love you” instead. So, Fei sets himself a goal: “Today I must break up with her,” setting the hilarious and heartfelt Kubrick, Like I Love You in motion.

Born and raised in Ganzhou, China, filmmaker Zefan Wang—here credited mononymously as Zefan—wrote and directed Kubrick, Like I Love You to complete his MFA in film at Columbia University School of the Arts, but the confident blend of tones and the formal experimentation are more the mark of a director with decades of experience. Zefan cleverly switches between black and white for the commentary of Fei’s direct to camera monologue and vibrant colour for the “real life” scenes, a bracing formal gambit used to great success.

Zefan fills Kubrick, Like I Love You with all sorts of stylistic flourishes: rear projection, costume drama fantasy sequences, photo booth freezeframes, black and white confessionals, direct to camera dialogue, and a charmingly frank voiceover. The crisp editing toggles back and forth between quick and snappy repartee for the couple’s dates, to elaborate long takes for heartfelt conversations and car rides. Starring the charming Xu Zhaobang as Fei, and the winsome Annie Xiong as Lou, Kubrick, Like I Love You has the expensive sheen and crowd-pleasing chemistry of a studio comedy but the scrappy energy and fresh ideas of an indie upstart, like when Zefan’s bold compositions switch to shaky handheld home video to capture Fei’s memories of Lou, good times confined to memories of the past.

Kubrick, Like I Love You is equally compelling in its realistic conversations and romantic drama as it is in its high-flying fantasy sequence where Fei finds himself in old timey armour, making action film moves against invisible enemies. Fei sees his life through the lens of cinephilia, people moving through his life just like characters in a film—one brilliant moment has movie credits rolling mid-film before a zoom reveals it to be the end of the comedy Fei and Lou are watching on their date.

Zefan deftly handles the heavy subject matter of the deterioration of a relationship, but executes it with a deliciously light touch, leavening even the most emotional scenes with a brisk liveliness, all leading up to a gasp-worthy fourth wall break where imagination and reality collide. We know the breakup is coming from the beginning of the film, but thanks to the emotional undercurrent running through Kubrick, Like I Love You and the performances of the young couple at its heart, it still hits hard, earning the emotional catharsis that it brings.

Review by: Joshua Hunt