The Widowed Witch
Ghost Stories
•
2h 0m
Directed by Cai Chengjie • Drama • With Tian Tian, Gao Pengcheng, Wang Qilin, Shuyan Feng • 2018 • 120 minutes
Winner of the top prize at the Rotterdam Film Festival, director Cai Chengjie’s debut feature is, like its titular protagonist, unexpectedly powerful and fiercely unpredictable.
Deemed cursed by the local villagers, three-time widow Er Hao (Tian Tian) has her hands full with a rogue fireworks explosion, a tagalong teenager, and a veritable army of crazed local men who can’t keep their hands off her. Turned away when she seeks shelter from her neighbors and forced to take up residence in a cold camper van, Er Hao’s future looks as bleak as the stark, snowy countryside.
But a series of fluke changes in fortune causes Er Hao to embrace the mystical identity her villagers have assigned to her. As a sort of modern shaman, she steers superstitions into small subversions, helping others who once shunned her and proving that to survive as a woman is a kind of magic.
With a stunning array of visual styles and a genre-exploding approach to storytelling, THE WIDOWED WITCH is a simultaneously idealistic and despairing film—a bleak view wrapped in a fabulist aesthetic, and one that encompasses both magic realism and crushing social satire.
"Appealingly eccentric fable from Chinese newcomer Cai Chengjie." —Guy Lodge, Variety
Up Next in Ghost Stories
-
Alois Nebel
Directed by Tomáš Luňák • Animation • With Miroslav Krobot,
Marie Ludvíková,
Karel Roden • 2012 • 80 minutesIt is the end of summer, 1989. Alois Nebel works as a train dispatcher at a small railway station in the Sudetenland, a mountainous region on the Czechoslovak border. He is a loner who pr...
-
Bedevil
Directed by Tracey Moffatt • Drama • 1993 • 90 minutes
BEDEVIL is the stunning debut feature from Tracey Moffatt (NIGHT CRIES, NICE COLORED GIRLS) and the first feature directed by an Australian Aboriginal woman. Inspired by ghost stories she heard as a child from both her extended Aboriginal an...
-
The Book of the Dead
Directed by Kihachiro Kawamoto • Animation • 2014 • 70 minutes
Master animator Kihachiro Kawamoto's tour de force adventure tale of a young noble girl in 8th-century Japan who leaves her home to follow the apparition of an executed prince in this ravishing film of beauty and mysticism.
As Buddh...
