What Director Zefan Learned About Cinema That Economics Couldn’t Explain

Before he ever peeked through the viewfinder of a film camera, Zefan Wang was taught to look at the world through models. As an undergraduate majoring in International Economy and Trade at Nankai University, he learned to think in terms of incentives, ROI, economic man and measurable yields. Value could be priced. Risk could be modelled. Decisions, at least in theory, could be explained.

Then, in a macroeconomics class, as a teaching method of his professor to demonstrate the 2008 housing crisis in a lively way, he watched The Big Short.

As a freshman in economics, Zefan did not yet have the technical vocabulary to fully parse every financial instrument or structural mechanism in the film. What stayed with him was something more immediate: the force of the emotional experience, the presence of the character, their love and pain. The film reached him emotionally far before he could reach it analytically. For Zefan, it suggested a truth that economics, for all its explanatory power, could not fully contain: We can feel, and thus we do feel, far before we understand, and we act upon that, far before we can justify why.

That tension between the rational and the emotional has since become central to Zefan’s conception towards film and filmmaking. Years later, after earning his MFA in Film from Columbia University, he emerged as an independent director whose work returns insistently to moments when logic fails to keep human feeling in place.

His short film Kubrick, Like I Love You brought that interest into sharp public view. In 2025, the film received the Bronze Medal in the Narrative category at the 52nd Student Academy Awards, making it one of the 3 winners selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 3,127 entries submitted by 988 colleges and universities worldwide. The same film also received a Special Mention at the 19th FIRST International Film Festival, where the Isabelle-Huppert-led jury praised its mature command of cinematic language and its psychological intricacy.

The premise of Kubrick, Like I Love You is almost comically rational. Its protagonist, Fei, decides to break up with his girlfriend for, among many other reasons, her inability to remember the director of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Here, cultural taste was treated as a stable metric, a system for measuring compatibility and even love itself. The decision to leave based on that is the starting proposition of the film: if compatibility and differences can be quantified, so can intimacy.

Zefan is drawn precisely to the point where that logic collapses.

Rather than allowing the film to remain a witty satire about cinephilia, he pushes it into a more unstable emotional register. As the past memory keeps invading the present through various flashbacks, voice-overs and documentary footage, the protagonist’s intellectual conviction exposes more and more of his own insecurity, vanity and longing.

The way Zefan uses cinematic form to dismantle his protagonist’s illusion of control is essential here. Brandon MacMurray highlighted the film’s “confident blend of tones and the formal experimentation,” noting devices such as rear projection, period fantasy, freeze-frames and the crisp switches between refined cinematography and home-video textures. In Zefan’s hands, these are not only ornamental flourishes, but also structural expressions of a consciousness trying to keep its feelings within an intact boundary of reason, and failing. The movie’s formal shifts are the embodiment of the character’s emotional instability.

However, Zefan’s work is not interested in merely painting rationality as a villain. He does not mock intelligence or analysis in themselves. What interests him is the moment they become defensive mechanisms: the moment systems of thought are used to organize, contain, or disguise emotional vulnerability. Just as in Kubrick, Like I Love You, the protagonist eventually finds the immense feelings he has for the person he desperately wanted to break up with, has been muted, blinded and distorted through his various forms of mediation. The comedy of that realization, and the tragedy of how that realization comes way too late, together makes a captivating and poignant ending.

In an interview with Film Office 101, Zefan mentioned that during the production process, he noticed that some collaborators would casually refer to the project as simply “Kubrick,” and avoiding the words “I Love You” as there is a slight discomfort, especially in Mandarin Chinese, to pronounce the phrase. For Zefan, that avoidance, reflected in this reluctance to say the phrase “I Love You”, is rooted in his character, and also tells something about a much broader reality.

That sensitivity to awkwardness, over-explanation, and emotional displacement may come in part from Zefan’s unusual route into film. Unlike directors whose public narratives begin with early immersion in cinema alone, Zefan arrived through another discipline altogether—one built on abstraction and systemic thinking. His film is alert to the ways people organize their lives through concepts—compatibility, aspiration, taste—while also recognizing how quickly those concepts break under pressure from real human experiences.

This is one reason Kubrick, Like I Love You feels larger than a 27-minute romantic comedy. It is not simply about a pretentious young man who weaponizes film references. It is about a deeper contemporary habit: the urge to interpret life correctly before one has truly lived it, and the corresponding panic that follows when emotion refuses to stay legible. Zefan understands the seduction of systems because he was trained inside one. And in his works, he tries to understand and expose their limit.

That may help explain why Kubrick, Like I Love You resonated beyond the classroom or the private circle of cinephiles who might immediately recognize its references. Its success did not come from insider cleverness alone. The film reaches something more broadly recognizable: the humiliation of discovering that one’s most polished theories about oneself can be easily dismantled by something as ordinary, and as uncontrollable, as love.

Economics gave Zefan Wang a language for systems. Cinema gave him a language for what exceeds them. Rather than choosing one against the other, he created works around their collision. In his films, people try to think their way toward clarity, only to find themselves overtaken by feelings that refuse to behave rationally. And in telling stories like this, Zefan has begun to define a directorial voice attuned to one of modern life’s most familiar contradictions: the more we try to analyze, structure and define ourselves, the more we are forced, eventually, to confront our fundamentally and beautifully uncontrollable desires as human.