Stonewalling

Twenty-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, gray markets, MLMs, and hustling in modern-day metropolitan China through the experiences of one ordinary young woman.

James Quandt, Art Forum: "Not since Jia Zhangke’s 'A Touch of Sin' has a film so powerfully limned the transactional nature of quotidian life in Xi’s neo-capitalist China."

Screen International by Wendy Ide: "An engrossing and thoughtful portrait of contemporary China."

indieWire by Steph Green: “STONEWALLING offers a precise view of a particular kind of Gen Z ennui."

ICS by Marc van de Klashorst: “STONEWALLING is testament to the idea that to build a compelling narrative one does not have to rely on excessive dramatic gesture.”

Slant Magazine by Sam C. Mac: "STONEWALLING is an attentive, engaged character study, an uncommonly candid women’s picture, and a film of dense and considered sociopolitical implications."

STONEWALLING is Beijing-based wife-and-husband team Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka's decade-spanning third collaboration with the talented actor Yao Honggu and the last film for the trilogy EGG AND STONE and THE FOOLISH BIRD. While each film stands alone, all are thematically connected and comprise a remarkable cinematic portrait of a young woman's journey into adulthood. Stunningly honest, this "left-behind children" trilogy (rural children of parents forced to leave their families to find jobs in cities) deals with sexual awakening, coming of age, young womanhood, and the struggle for female acceptance in a contemporary highly commodified China that offers young women limited options.