Acclaimed Chinese language actor Lyric Lan is ready to collaborate with rising filmmaker Lam Can-zhao on his newest venture “The Numbered Women.”
The socially-driven drama, which begins manufacturing this August, follows two marginalized girls – a Chinese language van driver and a Vietnamese therapeutic massage employee – whose lives briefly intersect in a distant city in Southern China. Lan, who rose to prominence along with her breakout efficiency within the tv sequence “Empresses within the Palace,” will tackle the function of the van driver.
“The Numbered Girls” represents the most recent proof-of-concept venture from Lam Can-zhao, the Chaozhou-born director whose quick movies have discovered recognition on the Berlinale and Pingyao. At simply 20, Lam made his directorial debut with “The Canine” and has since constructed a fame for centering rural lives and forgotten voices in his work, usually exploring the emotional aftermath of China’s mass rural-urban migration wave.
The venture continues Lam’s trajectory of inspecting lives of close to invisibility, this time specializing in grownup girls who, like the youngsters in his earlier movies, exist on society’s margins. The director has distinguished himself as the primary filmmaker to deliver the Chaozhou dialect to worldwide movie pageant screens, utilizing his native dialect and private historical past as a lens for inspecting modern Chinese language identification.
“I left my village at 18, however it took me a decade to return with a digital camera,” Lam says about his hometown in Chaozhou. “I regularly got here to know that my bond with my hometown was strongly linked to my identification as a filmmaker.”
The collaboration comes as Lam’s 2025 characteristic “Moments Like These” lately wrapped post-production. The movie brings collectively 4 distinct but interconnected tales set in the identical village, every exploring the bittersweet journey of rising up and capturing the resilience of kids left behind on account of rural-to-urban migration, divorce, or emotional distance. The venture incorporates a particular look by Chinese language singer and actor Jin Sha.
“The Numbered Girls” is co-produced by Jessica Shi, who outlined the venture’s thematic ambitions. “We wished to inform a narrative that not solely addresses gender, labor, and migration,” stated Shi, “but additionally asks what it means to dwell a life marked by numbers, not names. The second of connection between these two girls – nevertheless transient – is what provides them again their humanity.”
