A Woman Builds

Lynn lives with her grandparents in Meicheng, a small Hunanese city unsettled by an ongoing rape-murder investigation. With little structure to regulate her life outside of school, where she is bullied, Lynn begins smuggling and reselling confiscated mobile phones with her friend, which leads to encounters with the city’s seedier inhabitants.

20 year-old Lynn is told she needs English classes, flight attendant school, and a go getter-attitude. She perseveres along this path of upward mobility until she finds out she's pregnant. Indecisive and running out of time, she tells her boyfriend she's had an abortion and instead returns to her feuding parents and their failing clinic to try and figure out what's next.

14-year-old Honggui is forced to live with her uncle and aunt in the countryside. She is not wanted by them, nor was she wanted by her parents, who apparently intended to farm her out to family for two years so they could work in the city. Years pass. When she tries to make contact, her real mother is too busy to take her call.

After drifting in Beijing for many years, Lin Shanshan returned to her hometown in the south and transformed the old house she once lived in with her grandmother into a homestay. Here, she experienced four wonderful and heartwarming stories with her guests.

This guerrilla-style drama exposes the harsh reality of money-driven child marriages in China. The Chinese government wants to keep the subject of this film hidden, but it's undeniable that arranged marriages and bride-buying still exist in China's poorer provinces. The filmmakers witnessed these practices firsthand, through their own family members. In the film, we follow 14-year-old Hani, who dreams of marrying Pushiha. However, in the village, every bride comes with a hefty price tag. Desperate, Hani looks for ways to raise the money, even if it means committing crimes. This heartbreaking, real-life Romeo and Juliet story reflects a harsh truth.

Lin Sen lives with her father in a tiny village in China. This twelve-year-old girl has begun to notice a change in her relationship with her father. But Li Sen isn’t sure if this has something to do with her new-found knowledge of puberty and sexuality or is simply due to the cold winter.

In the later stages of the epidemic, a young couple who constantly argued over work, a partner who had a conflict, a friend who didn't show up for a long time, their video chats were interwoven and recorded on a computer screen with anxiety, boredom, and hope.