With Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka’s Stonewalling, an official selection of the 60th New York Film Festival, opening this Friday featuring filmmaker Q&As during opening weekend, we’re pleased to premiere two exclusive clips from the film, courtesy of KimStim.

Explore showtimes and get tickets to Stonewalling.

Stonewalling (2022)

For more than a decade, Beijing-based wife-and-husband team Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka have been making films about the lives of young people in China—in many cases “left-behind children,” or those whose parents are forced to leave their families to find jobs in cities. Expanding their project, their gripping, humane yet uncompromising latest, shot with a precise formal economy by Otsuka (who also serves as cinematographer), focuses on a year in the life of Lynn, a flight-attendant-in-training whose plans to finish college are thrown into doubt when she discovers she’s pregnant. Not wanting an abortion (a decision she hides from her callow, absent boyfriend, away on modeling and party hosting gigs), she hopes to give the child away after carrying it to term, while staying afloat amidst a series of dead-end jobs. As incarnated by the filmmakers’ quietly potent recurring star Yao Honggui, Lynn—whose story continues after being the center of the filmmakers’ acclaimed The Foolish Bird (2017)—is both a fully rounded character and the vessel for an urgent critique of a modern-day social structure that has few options for women in need of care. An NYFF60 Main Slate selection. A KimStim release with support from the China Institute.

Join Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka in person:

• Fri, March 10 at 7pm – Stonewalling Q&A
• Sat, March 11 at 4pm – Stonewalling, extended discussion moderated by Karen Ma
• Sat, March 11 at 8pm – Egg and Stone Intro
• Sun, March 12 at 4pm – Stonewalling Q&A, moderated by Jiwei Xiao
• Sun, March 12 at 8pm – The Foolish Bird Intro