(L-R) Huang Lu, Flora Lau, and Sandrine Pinna attend the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of “LUZ” at The Egyptian Theatre on January 23, 2025, in Park City, UT. (Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
By Sandy Phan
On a cold winter’s day, writer-director Flora Lau receives an enthusiastic welcome from the audience as she is introduced and steps onto the stage at The Egyptian Theatre in Park City, Utah. LUZ is premiering in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
For her film, Lau takes us into a fictional virtual reality (VR) game called LUZ where players seek a mystic deer, which, in many cultures, symbolizes peace and harmony. We are introduced to two sets of characters whose stories come together in the VR world but not in the real world.
One story is set in Chongqing, China. Wei (Xiao Dong Guo) searches for his estranged daughter, Fa (Lu Huang), a social media influencer. Unsure of how to find her, his quest stumbles into the VR world to find her. The second plot line follows Ren (Sandrine Pinna), a Hong Kong gallery owner, who travels to Paris to care for her stepmother, Sabine (Isabelle Huppert). When Ren cannot reconcile Sabine’s decision with her medical treatment, she retreats into LUZ, where she habitually finds some purpose.
Lau explains, “‘Luz’ is the Latin word for light, but it’s not light that is coming from your light bulb. It’s organic, universal light that connects us all.” In the film, the VR game LUZ provides the intersection between Wei and Ren, but it also connects them to their ultimate goals.
(L-R) Aric Chen, Mimi Xu, Huang Lu, Sandrine Pinna, Flora Lau, Shari Frilot, Yvette Tang, and Joseph Sinn Gi Chan attend the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of “LUZ” at The Egyptian Theatre on January 23, 2025, in Park City, UT. (Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
LUZ was a labor of love for everyone involved in the film’s journey. Lau shares that the process was eight years long due to many obstacles. “It took me quite a while to develop the script, and the game part was especially very difficult to figure out, and the production was across a few different countries.” At the premiere’s Q&A, she invites seven members of her film team to join her on stage, and we can see that she is surrounded by her film family, who were committed to the project from conception to completion.
(L-R) Isabelle Huppert attends the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of “LUZ” at The Egyptian Theatre on January 23, 2025, in Park City, UT. (Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
We’re surprised when Isabelle Huppert makes an unexpected appearance via recorded video and says, “The way [Lau] guides us toward technology’s complexities is really riveting, and its relation to art, family, and healing.” Lau pushes us to consider the parameters of what is real: the tangible and known physical world or the fantastic realism of virtual reality?
“In Buddhism, everything is supposed to be an illusion … I’ve been trying to solve this concept for a long time, and I’m still solving it,” Lau says. “This is why I’ve made this film — to resolve whether everything we see is real or not. This idea of what’s real and what’s not real is fascinating to me.”
