SYNOPSIS:

NINE LIVES / 九命 Shanghai. COVID lockdown. A city sealed from the outside in. A retired soldier in his fifties lives alone on the 24th floor with his cat — a white-and-orange tabby who is, at this point, the last living piece of his old life. He has complied with everything. The sealed doors, the drone sermons, the needles without asking. He has given them all of it. Then the Dabai come for the cat. He kicks through a welded door and descends twenty-four floors to get him back — one floor at a time, nine near-deaths, the building coming apart around him as he goes. He fights with the precision of a man who spent decades in places where bad decisions kill you. He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t ask for help. But the building watches him descend. A tech quietly kills the camera feeds. An elderly couple pull a nail from his shoulder and join the fight. A father whose daughter’s cat was taken in the same bags carries his photograph through the lower floors. Residents who blocked his path begin to step aside. Then to follow. By the time he reaches the lobby, sixty people are behind him. He didn’t come to start a revolution. He came for the cat. The revolution followed anyway — because people watched a man who had complied for years finally say no, and decided they could too. In the courtyard, SWAT rifles up. He stands with the cat on his shoulder and doesn’t raise his hands. One by one, the guns become irrelevant. The cat is real. The rest is fiction.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

NINE LIVES