Queens of the Qing Dynasty

Ashley McKenzie
Part of

60th New York Film Festival

September 30 - October 16, 2022

Ashley McKenzie’s follow-up to her breakthrough addiction drama Werewolf charts the budding friendship of a suicidal teen and a volunteer immigrant hospital worker and creates an aesthetically audacious two-hander constructed of complex sonic landscapes and visual textures.

DIRECTOR
Ashley McKenzie
YEAR
2022
COUNTRY
Canada
RUNTIME
122 minutes
LANGUAGE
English, Mandarin Chinese, and Russian with English subtitles

Q&As with Ashley McKenzie and Sarah Walker on Oct. 1 & 2

After the latest in a series of suicide attempts, 18-year-old Star (Sarah Walker) wakes up in the hospital and remains dazed and disaffected as doctors and nurses try to rehabilitate, or at least break through to, them. The only person there who is able to penetrate Star’s consciousness is a volunteer named An (Ziyin Zheng), a kind-souled Chinese immigrant who becomes a lifeline for the similarly genderqueer but otherwise radically different Star. Ashley McKenzie’s follow-up to her breakthrough addiction drama Werewolf takes Star and An’s budding friendship as an anchor for something much stranger and more complex than a simple tale of recovery against odds. Instead, this is an aesthetically audacious two-hander constructed of insistent sonic landscapes and visual textures that convey the almost metastatic nature of love. McKenzie’s strategy of expressing her characters’ intense interiority forces normal definitions of space and time to expand and contract.

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Queens of the Qing Dynasty
Queens of the Qing Dynasty
Queens of the Qing Dynasty

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