A seven-year-old girl lives through her parents' separation, grows up too fast and decides that adults all lie. When the country bans chewing gum, she secretly sells bubble gum to her classmates for profit. She has a crush on a boy in her class and grows her hair long to catch his eye. Her tomboyish little sister sometimes annoys her, but the two can never be apart. They live at their grandmother's; their father is feckless and keeps changing girlfriends; their mother, seen only at weekends, dresses up beautifully but is unhappy. Drawing on her own childhood memories, the director made her first feature, recreating the joys and sorrows of growing up in the 1990s and seeing through the absurdities and tangles of the adult world with a child's eyes on a broken family. The film won the Youth Jury Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and was in the running for its "Future Light" best film award, and at the Hong Kong International Film Festival it was nominated for the Firebird Award (Chinese-language) in the Young Cinema Competition and won Best Actress.
Translated from English by IFFDAY, not yet reviewed.
