Chinese filmmaker Zou Jing has won the €2,500 Next Step Hildegarde award from Cannes’ Critics’ Week for her upcoming debut feature A Girl Unknown. Didar Domehri of France’s Maneki Films has come on to co-produce the film with Yan Wang of China-France production house Memoria Films.
The film is a coming-of-age tale about identity that follows the journey of a young Chinese girl from age six through her thirties who lives with three different families.
It explores how China’s one-child policy affected generations of abandoned girls in the country from the 1980s to the 2000s.
The writer-director previously won the 2021 Critics’ Week prize for her short film Lili Alone that won a slew of awards and screened at more than 80 international film festivals. A Girl Unknown is set to shoot at the end of this year in China.
Ten short-film directors from across the globe were selected to participate in the 10th edition of the Next Step programme that took place in Normandy and Paris in December and brings together filmmakers who have premiered their films at Critics’ Week to present their upcoming features in development during a workshop with industry mentors.
Previous films from the programme include Matthew Rankin’s 2024 Directors’ Fortnight feature Universal Language, 2024 Berlin premieres Qiu Yang’s Some Rain Must Fall and York’s Zois’ Arcadia, plus Molly Manning Walker’s How To Have Sex and Felipe Galvez’s The Settlers’among 35 completed features to date.
Critics’ Week wraps in Cannes tomorrow (May 23).
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