Breezily paced and ultimately optimistic despite being full of sorrow, Zou Jing’s film is a story of existential survival, led by the terrific 'Resurrection' actress Li Gengxi.
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Courtesy of Pyramide International The wounds of abandonment and displacement are at the root of Zou Jing’s achingly poetic “A Girl Unknown,” a sober and quietly devastating portrayal of an adolescent girl whose identity, maybe even humanity, has been toyed with by a fractured law. That would be China’s controversial one-child policy, recently interrogated in Nanfu Wang’s stunning documentary “One Child Nation.” While “A Girl Unknown” isn’t directly an examination of the severe initiative that was introduced in 1979 to control the country’s population growth (and formally ended in early 2016, with its additional restrictions terminated in the following years), its harrowing echoes are all over Jing’s story, which spans 12 years, starting in the 1980s.
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