Egg and Stone

Introduction from Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka on March 11! Join the directors at additional screenings:

• Sun, March 12 at 4pm – Stonewalling Q&A
• Sun, March 12 at 8pm – The Foolish Bird Intro

Huang Ji’s auspicious feature debut from 2012 is an autobiographical portrait of irrevocable social and familial collapse in contemporary China. Set in the director’s home village in Hunan Province and made exclusively with local non-professional actors (one of them a family member of the director), Egg and Stone follows a 14-year-old girl named Honggui (Yao Honggui, in her debut), left to navigate the traumatic consequences of a sexual assault under the supervision of her aunt and uncle, with whom she has been living for seven years while her parents work in the city. This remarkably poised, unsparing depiction of poverty and abuse, meticulously shot by Ryuji Otsuka (who also served as the film’s editor and producer), reveals the profound complications of urban migration and the ongoing degradation of women in the wake of China’s “loosened” one-child policy. Although the film’s national premiere at the 2012 Beijing Independent Film Festival was cut short mid-screening, that same year it won the Tiger Award, the top prize at the Rotterdam Film Festival. An Icarus Films release.