Female Directors: Two Recent Films from China

“Female Directors” – Director: Yang Mingming; 2012, 43 min, Chinese w/English subtitles. Two brilliant young women, art school graduates with deliciously profane vocabularies and supreme confidence, talk sex, cinema, and power, as they wield their shared video camera like a scalpel.

“Egg and Stone” – Director: Huang Ji; 2012, 98 min, Hunan dialect w/English subtitles. Set in rural Hunan province, Egg and Stone is a powerful autobiographical portrait of a 14-year-old girl’s attempts to come to terms with her emerging sexual maturity. Since her parents moved to the city to work, she has been forced to live with her uncle and aunt for seven years. Alone with her own inchoate fears and desires, she grapples with a terrifying world of sexual awakening and danger.