Description
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.
Reviews
Critic’s Pick! “A cool, quietly brilliant heartbreaker!
Few movies capture the surreal comedy and engulfing horror of the money-driven world as piercingly as STONEWALLING. “
—Manohla Dargis,THE NEW YORK TIMES
—Peyton Robinson, RogerEbert
“Not since Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin (2013) has a film so powerfully limned the transactional nature of quotidian life in Xi’s neo-capitalist China.”
—Artforum by James Quandt
“An engrossing and thoughtful portrait of contemporary China.”
—Screen International by Wendy Ide
“STONEWALLING offers a precise view of a particular kind of Gen Z ennui.”
—indieWire by Steph Green
“STONEWALLING is testament to the idea that to build a compelling narrative one does not have to rely on excessive dramatic gesture.”
—ICS by Marc van de Klashorst
“STONEWALLING is an attentive, engaged character study, an uncommonly candid women’s picture, and a film of dense and considered sociopolitical implications.”
—Slant Magazine by Sam C. Mac
Festivals
