Fan Jian

In China, single women are under immense pressure to marry young or face the stigma that comes with being "leftover." Leftover Women follows three hopeful singles seeking to define love on their own terms.

Yu Xiuhua was raised to hope for little from her life in the rural Chinese province of Hubei. At 19, Xiuhua’s mother encouraged her to marry a man nearly twice her age, fearful no one else would accept a wife with Xiuhua’s condition — cerebral palsy. But as her 20th anniversary approaches, Xiuhua’s poetry goes viral, and she becomes the voice of a rising feminist movement throughout China.

After a massive earthquake razed a Chinese city to the ground, thousands of parents who lost their children are encouraged to give a new birth so that they can move on with their lives. AFTER THE RAIN follows two of these families for over a decade. Haunted by fear, resentment, and unspeakable grief, the families find hope beyond their intergenerational trauma is hard to build.

In May 2010, Ye Hongmei, a native of Dujiangyan city in Sichuan province, started her Odyssey to get pregnant again. Her eight year old daughter was killed in the devastating Wenchuan earthquake of 2008, a catastrophe that killed and maimed more than 6000 children. Due to China's one-child policy, most of the grieving families were left childless.

With his camera hidden in the back of a Beijing taxi, director Fan Jian manages to overhear the daily conversations between driver and passengers. In the cramped space of the car, customers share their secrets, their hopes, their conjectures about the future, and sometimes even offer advice to the driver.

Chen Chun, My Land’s central figure, left the countryside fifteen years ago to settle in the outskirts of Beijing. Happily living with his family in the shadow of the capital, he makes a living by growing and selling vegetables. However, the city, ceaselessly expanding, eventually reaches Chen’s farm. The landowner, saying that the area will be redeveloped, tries to force Chen to leave.

Chinese poet Xiuhua Yu, who has cerebral palsy, became instantly famous when her poems went viral on social media. When it happened she was stuck in a violent and loveless marriage in rural China. Director Jian Fan’s award-winning 2016 documentary Still Tomorrow followed her throughout her breakthrough year, when she gained the financial freedom to end her marriage. All that was missing was love.

An idealist bent on speaking for China's peasants, a rural youth striving to assimilate into urban life, a young girl drifting between city and country, a rebel whose passions blended money and literature—they possessed rural blood, yet their souls danced in chains in the city. They returned home time and again, fleeing from it; they struggled to break free from their shackles, only to find their true selves again and again. Where was home, where was spiritual refuge? Amidst the urban jungle, they trudged forward, sighing silently.

Beijing is the coordinate of China before 2008. A taxi driver, married for 7 years, his passion has gone while the city he lives is on its peak time of passion. In spring, the driver says to every passenger, “the sandstorm is coming tomorrow.” Summer comes, the driver complains to the passengers that his wife doesn’t love him anymore. The passengers also have their own share of stories of happiness and sorrow. Someone is going through a break-up and it is heart-breaking; someone came all the way to meet his old lover in a night club of Beijing; someone told the driver, it’s normal to have a loveless life. Autumn time, the driver tells the passengers that, he wants to be a monk, but where is the place with the absolute peace? Different passengers have different responses and answers…