Director/ Screenwriter: Huang Ji

Cinematographer/ Editor: Otsuka Ryuji

Region: China

Year of Production: 2012

Running Time: 97min

Prizes:

2012 IFF Rotterdam, Tiger Award for Feature Film

2012 Special Committee Award, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival.

Synopsis:

Huang Ji’s quietly disturbing film about one of China’s “leftover children” was made in the Hunan village in which the director herself was born. These children number approximately 60 million, and are one of the social fallouts of the period of opening and reform whereby parents who move to the cities to seek work have no choice but to leave their children with grandparents or other family members or guardians in the countryside.

14 year-old Hong Gui moved in with her uncle and aunt when her parents left for the city when she was 7 years-old. Feeling unwanted by everyone, the girl grows up without a sense of belonging, and when she tries to make contact with her parents, her mother is too busy to take the call. As Hong Gui's story gradually unfolds, Huang presents the manifold difficulties faced by women across China. Widespread poverty and the one-child policy combine to ensure that parents in rural areas invariably choose to have boys. A tale read aloud by one of the characters in the film illustrates just how deeply-anchored certain prejudices against women are: women’s blood pollutes the water for virtuous men, they say, and women can only cleanse themselves by praying. Just as in the Old Testament, women are to blame for most social ills.

The male characters depicted in Egg and Stone are not shown to be as virtuous as they might be however. A motif that recurs in the film – Hong Gui's legs opening and closing – is a powerful reminder of the horrors of coercion, and the ways in which tyranny is justified as a God-given right by those who are physically strong.

Ji Huang (b. 1984, Hunan Province, China) studied scriptwriting at the Beijing Film Academy. Her favorite filmmakers include Krzysztof Kieslowski and Kawase Naomi. Her first short film, The Warmth of Orange Peel was presented at the Berlinale in 2009. Egg and Stone is her first full-length film. It premiered in the Tiger Awards Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2012.