Tennis Bar. Niu Lai Runs in a Browser Window

Wednesday 2 September 2026, 8 pm, Reuterstraße 95. Free entry, announced two days earlier on Instagram with a hand-drawn poster: two cattle as outlines, one yellow, one orange, the lettering done by hand. The room is a neighbourhood bar with a low ceiling and dark wooden beams, and a tinsel curtain hangs to the left of the screen. The red and the green stage lamp stay on for the whole showing. Twenty to thirty people, which here counts as a full house. There is a short introduction before the film.

What comes up on the screen first is not a title sequence but a government body. Green ground, the dragon logo, below it 公映许可证 and the number 电审动字(2024)第033号, 国家电影局, China Film Administration. The screening licence for Chinese cinemas, ripped along with everything else. Above it sits the window bar, in small type: Niu Lai Full Movie (English Subtitles). Along the bottom edge runs the player's progress bar with the timecode. The laptop stands on a flight case against the wall on the right. The announcement had not hidden any of this but made it the programme: through the power of YouTube and community, let us watch the box-office smash together.

The film delivers what the screenshots promise. Trees are textured spheres on sticks in front of a cyan sky with no gradient. A leopard looks into the camera, spotted, with a humanly shaped mouth and eyes that do not quite sit at the same height. Later a cow in close-up, so close that only forehead and muzzle fit in the frame. Subtitles run doubled, Chinese above English, and along the bottom they are clipped because the aspect ratio is wrong. At one point the picture jumps to a small rectangle in the middle of the screen, a quarter of the surface, surrounded by white. Nobody corrects it. Nobody laughs harder about it than about the film itself, either.

This is where the evening gets interesting. Xin Yumeng and Sun Lifang, son and mother from Dalian, worked on the film for five years, on second-hand computers, animating in SketchUp, a program for architectural models. They are the entire crew and they speak every role. In the first nine days after the release on 5 August the film sold 236 tickets and took 7,169 yuan, and the number of prints fell from 245 to four. Then the mockery on the Chinese platforms turned into curiosity, cinemas painted posters by hand and wrote on them that anyone into the bizarre should come in and that there would be no refunds. Final total: 60.27 million yuan.

In Neukölln only the end of that story is visible, and in its most honest form. No distributor, no print, no screen mask to cover up the format. A window on a wall, with a title bar and a progress bar, and an audience that comes for the gap between ambition and result rather than against it. The same evening the same film ran in Brooklyn, at Seventh Heaven Bar & Karaoke, also free and sold out. For San Francisco someone on X was still looking for a co-host. More dates at Tennis Bar have been announced; the response was strong enough for that.

Photographs: Florian Jäger, 2 September 2026.