‘We Girls’ review: Feng Xiaogang and Zhao Liying unite for teary ex-con drama

Dir. Feng Xiaogang. China. 2025. 124mins

In China, female ex-prisoners find their ability to reintegrate into society hindered by social stigma and scant employment prospects, society often viewing them with suspicion. These hurdles are dramatised in We Girls, which finds perennial hitmaker Feng Xiaogang oscillating between harsh realism and a sentimental celebration of sisterhood, often within the same scene.

Provides a compassionate perspective on a marginalised group.

Marketed as a star vehicle for Zhao Liying and capitalsing on her television fame and big screen success in 2024’s Article 20, Tiger Wolf Rabbit and The Unseen Sister,  We Girls is actually a two-header with Lan Xiya as a pair of ex-convicts striving to achieve their dreams of a better future. It’s their feisty chemistry that powers We Girls through its less plausible stretches.

We Girls opened domestically during the Qingming Festival, taking an estimated $10.8m; a respectable return given that China’s theatrical market remains in an overall slump despite receiving a boost from the Lunar New Year period. This would still count as a modest success for Feng (Big Shot’s Funeral, etc) whose recent output – sincere tearjerker Only Cloud Knows (2019) and series finale If You are the One 3 (2023) – has failed to set the box office alight. Internationally, the director’s profile remains diametrically opposed to his household name status at home, but We Girls is the kind of nonstop emotional rollercoaster that should attract viewers on streaming.

Set during the 2010s, it begins behind bars with Gao Yuexiang (Zhao) doing time for participating in the online sex industry. Able to use sign language because her daughter is hearing impaired, Gao takes deaf mute inmate Mao Amei (Lan) under her wing and friendship blossoms. Upon release, they initially go their separate ways. Gao wants to reclaim her daughter who is being raised in an orphanage, while Mao is meant to return to the crime syndicate that trained her to be an especially nimble thief. 

Determined to raise the funds needed to provide her daughter with a stable address and a cochlear implant, Gao throws herself into service work but soon encounters prejudice. Meanwhile, Mao avoids returning to the exploitative clutches of snakelike underworld boss Lao Die (Qian Yi) but resorts to begging due to lacking an identity card. Yet fate soon reunites them. Pooling their meagre resources, they rent cheap accommodation and set about improving their finances through menial jobs and opportunistic schemes.

Although celebrated for ribbing China’s ever-changing social fabric with crowd-pleasing comedies, Feng is a sophisticated filmmaker who effectively incorporated first-person perspective in his anti-war epic Assembly (2007) and cleverly utilised circular framing to evoke bureaucratic restriction in I Am Not Madame Bovary (2016). Befitting its subject matter, We Girls evinces a rough and ready aesthetic with cinematographer Florian Zinke largely favouring handheld camerawork. This adds an observational quality to the prison prologue that is only broken by colourfully lit, slickly presented flashbacks juxtaposing the lure of quick money with its drab consequences. It also serves sudden shifts in mood, as the transitory nature of Gao and Mao’s job opportunities places them in tight spots: a scene in which an arrangement with a beverage promoter goes south unnervingly illustrates the knife edge that these women are living on.

We Girls is as much about the rigours and expectations of China’s criminal rehabilitation process as it is about the individual struggle to reform. This system is embodied by dedicated prison case officer Deng Hong (Chuo Ni) who is sympathetic to Gao and Mao to the extent that she assists them on the outside. Still, she practices a tough love approach that shows limited tolerance for slip-ups and maintains a sense of hierarchy. As such, there is a sense that Gao and Mao indefinitely exist in-between the worlds of prison and true freedom, with shabby surroundings emphasising this. (Gao sleeps in a dormitory when briefly employed as a hotel cleaner, while her residence with Mao is in a condemned building.) Moreover, Gao’s continued moral flexibility towards obtaining money threatens to setback any positive development.

Feng and co-screenwriter Chong An posit that China’s complex society features numerous unconventional family units (the film’s Chinese title of ’Sunflowers’ refers to a prison theatre troupe which bonds through performance). This theme is most affectingly conveyed through the central dynamic between Gao and Mao, which convincingly evolves from mother-daughter to selfless partnership. Zhao and Lan are equally impressive, with the latter’s endearing cheekiness playing off the former’s suppressed frustration. If the lurches into melodrama can be trying and the contrivances hard to buy (Gao and Mao getting released on the same day is the first of many convenient turns), We Girls nonetheless provides a compassionate perspective on a marginalised group.