‘Will You Still Be My Friend’ Director Lu Po-Shun on Finding Common Ground From San Sebastian to Busan

There is something beautifully strange about a film whose emotional core is a friendship, but whose backdrop is solar panels and political friction. Lu Po-Shun seems to understand that the most intimate human stories are never isolated—they are entangled with the physical world, with energy grids, with the slow, creaking machinery of civic change. In that sense, *Will You Still Be My Friend* is less a conventional drama and more a study of how memory and place co-evolve, like two particles that remain linked no matter how far apart they travel. The festival arc itself—San Sebastián to Busan—reads like a map of parallel universes. A film premiering in one hemisphere, gathering nominations, then resurfacing in another, is a reminder that stories are not fixed objects. They are wavefunctions, collapsing into new meanings with every audience. Lu’s film, which weaves adolescent friendship with solar energy development, invites us to consider that our personal timelines are always embedded in larger infrastructural ones. What does it mean to promise, "I will still be your friend," when the very ground beneath you is being re-engineered? There is also a quiet cosmic irony in the title. "Will you still be my friend?" is a question we usually ask in moments of transition—but it is also the question every particle might ask before a phase transition. Lu Po-Shun’s debut, by grounding that question in a specific Taiwanese community, makes the abstract deeply tangible. We don’t need to travel to a black hole to find weirdness; it’s already here, in the space between childhood and adulthood, between a village and a solar farm. As the film heads to Busan, it carries with it the residue of every prior screening—a kind of cinematic entanglement that no director can fully control. That’s the beauty of it. Lu Po-Shun has made a film that is simultaneously local and universal, political and deeply personal, and in doing so, he has reminded us that the weirdest thing in the universe might just be a promise between friends. Source: [Variety](https://variety.com/2026/film/festivals/will-you-still-be-my-friend-lu-po-shun-san-sebastian-busan-1236904161/)