Niu Lai at Tennis Bar. The Title Bar Stays On

Before the film starts, the screen shows a government body. Green ground, the dragon logo, and beneath 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, in small type, sits the window bar reading Niu Lai Full Movie (English Subtitles). Along the bottom runs the player's progress bar with the timecode. At Tennis Bar in Neukölln, "Niu Lai" is playing as a YouTube stream, and for this film that is no stopgap. Its flop and its success cannot be pulled apart, and here both are visible, right down to the projection.

Tennis Bar, at Reuterstraße 95, 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 green stage lamps stay on for the whole showing. The laptop sits on a flight case against the wall on the right. Between 20 and 30 people are here, which counts as a full house. The screening, on Wednesday 2 September at 8pm with free entry, was announced two days earlier on Instagram with a hand-drawn poster: two cattle in outline, one yellow, one orange, the lettering done by hand. The announcement went as far as making the stream the point. Through the power of YouTube and community, it said, we would watch the box-office smash together. There is a short introduction before the film.

The film delivers what the screenshots promise. Trees are textured spheres on sticks against 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 level. Later comes a cow in close-up, so close that only forehead and muzzle fit in the frame. The animals have faces and the trees have no branches. The landscape in between looks like an architectural model that someone has filled with figures.

The projection adds errors of its own. Subtitles run doubled, Chinese above English, and are clipped along the bottom because the aspect ratio is wrong. The sphere trees appear in a frame within a frame. At one point the picture jumps to a small, slightly skewed rectangle in the middle of the screen, a quarter of its surface, surrounded by white. Nobody fixes it, and nobody laughs at it any harder than at the film. Whether a mistake belongs to the film or to the screening makes no difference to the room tonight.

Xin Yumeng and Sun Lifang, son and mother from Dalian, spent five years on the film, working on second-hand computers and animating in SketchUp, a program for architectural models. They are the entire crew and voice every role. In the first nine days after its 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 Chinese platforms turned into curiosity. Cinemas painted posters by hand, telling anyone into the bizarre to come in and warning that there would be no refunds. By the end it had taken 60.27 million yuan. Intentionally or not, Tennis Bar's hand-drawn poster belongs to that line.

In Neukölln, four weeks after the Chinese release, only the end of that story is visible, and in its most honest form. There is no distributor and no print, and no screen mask to hide the format, just a window on a wall with a title bar and a progress bar. In front of it sit people who came because of the gap between ambition and result. 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, which says something about the response.

Still, something about it is uncomfortable. Two people spent five years building something that is now celebrated in Berlin, in Brooklyn and perhaps soon in San Francisco for what went wrong with it. The 60.27 million yuan is a success. Whether it is the success the two of them wanted, the progress bar does not say.

The screening of "Niu Lai" was at Tennis Bar, Reuterstraße 95, Berlin, on 2 September 2026 at 8pm; entry was free.

Photographs: Florian Jäger, 2 September 2026.