Directed by Ji Huang, Ryûji Otsuka • Drama • With Honggui Yao • 2022 • 148 minutes
20 year-old Lynn is told she needs English classes, flight attendant school, and a go getter-attitude. She perseveres along this path of upward mobility until she finds out she’s pregnant. Indecisive and running out of time, she tells her boyfriend she’s had an abortion and instead returns to her feuding parents and their failing clinic to try and figure out (if she can) what’s next.
Built from interviews with college women happy to invest in themselves, observations of a post-Tik Tok China, and their own lived experiences, STONEWALLING is perceptive with meticulous attention to detail. Returning with a now adult Yao Honggui (FOOLISH BIRD, EGG AND STONE) opposite the directors’ own parents, husband-and-wife team Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka take a look at the new norms of gig-economy, grey markets, MLMs, and hustling in modern-day metropolitan China through the experiences of one ordinary young woman.
"Few movies capture the surreal comedy and engulfing horror of the money-driven world as piercingly as Stonewalling. A cool, quietly brilliant heartbreaker." —The New York Times
Up Next in New York Times Critic’s Pick
-
Youth (Spring)
Directed by Wang Bing • Documentary • 2023 • 215 minutes
The town of Zhili, about 95 miles from Shanghai, is a center for the children’s garment industry. Workers in their teens and early twenties come from surrounding provinces to live in sparse, trash-strewn concrete dorms in the same building...
-
The Wolf House
Directed by Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña • Animation • 2018 • 72 minutes
Maria, a young woman finds refuge in a house in the south of Chile after escaping from a sect of German religious fanatics. She is welcomed into the home by two pigs, the only inhabitants of the place. Like in a dream,...
-
The Strangler
Directed by Paul Vecchiali • Drama • With Jacques Perrin • 1970 • 96 minutes
An unconventional French giallo released before the sub-genre’s popularity boom resulting from filmmakers like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, THE STRANGLER centers on Émile (Jacques Perrin, The Young Girls of Rochefort)...
