Unfolding the future

Hao Jingfang wins the Hugo Award for best novelette with her work Folding Beijing in 2016. Her latest project is the film The Last Brave Man, directed by Yang Chao. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Science fiction, a dominant genre in Hollywood, has yet to find its feet in the Chinese movie industry. But change is underway.

Hugo Award-winning novelist Hao Jingfang and Yang Chao, director of Crosscurrent, an internationally acclaimed Chinese film, have teamed up to bring The Last Brave Man to the country's moviegoers.

Based on a 2012 novel of the same title by Hao, the film will be set in an ambiguously-defined futurist world.

The film is likely to be released in late 2018 or early 2019.

The author became the first Chinese woman to win the coveted prize for her other novel－Folding Beijing－in 2015.

Yang, a fan of the genre, made his debut with Passages, a feature that won him the Camera d'Or at Cannes in 2014.

Crosscurrent won awards in Berlin and Taipei.

Seen through the perspective of a clone refugee who is betrayed to his rulers, The Last Brave Man film is expected to explore what human cloning may mean for society.