VIFF -- Review: A Girl Unknown

The film traces the lives of girls and women in China

A Girl Unknown (2026)

The film opens showing a shy six-year-old girl sitting on a rock as she watches other children play in the water. Lin Juan (Cao Ruofan) is a tomboy who doesn't like wearing dresses or following the expectations of how a girl should behave.

But her father doesn't seem to mind, and makes her a kite out of bamboo and paper. However, when he dies suddenly, her mother soon finds another partner and is pregnant in a rural village. 

Lin Juan is played by Cao Ruofan

She takes Juan to an auntie in the city, perhaps Guangzhou, for what the girl is initially told a few months. But the reality is that her mother is not coming back, and thus begins Juan living a new identity, and trying to adapt to her new surroundings.

The auntie is kind, sophisticated, but her husband dislikes to the girl. Ten years later Juan (now played by Li Gengxi) is a teenager in the mid-1980s who loves dancing, listening to Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing and hanging out with her friends. But does she really belong?

Throughout A Girl Unknown we see how girls and women are treated in Chinese society, and how Juan tries to navigate the system on her own terms. At one point she gets a job in a textile factory, and viewers get a glimpse of what life is like, and how workers try to survive being cogs in a big, never-ending wheel.

Li Gengxi is the older Ruan in the film

Juan lives a difficult life, psychologically, trying to understand how her life came to be this way, and the audience is too. 

It is a reminder that women in China are theoretically supposed to be "holding up half the sky" according to Mao Zedong, but in reality they are expected to do that and more without much appreciation or respect.

A Girl Unknown is first-time director Zou Jing's subtle but devastating critique of women's lives in China, both rich and poor, and her two leading actresses playing Juan at six and 17 are excellent. Not only do they look very similar, but they each retain that tomboyishness and rebellious streak.

While the pace of the film may seem slow at times, a lot of things happen, and the motif of water recurs over and over again to great effect.

This is Zou's debut film

A Girl Unknown

Directed by Zou Jing

128 mins

VIFF -- Review: Farruquito: A Flamenco Dynasty

A scene shows Farruquito's brilliance as a dancer (centre) 

As I was writing my posts about Paris (finally finished!), I attended the 45th Vancouver International Film Festival and saw 12 films, a mixture of dramas, documentaries and animation.

For 11 days I had quite the schedule, in many instances seeing two films per day! It almost felt like a job, having to wake up early to take public transit downtown and get there at least 30 minutes before the screening to queue up in order to get a good seat in the movie theatre!

In some cases there was already a long line half an hour before. To pass the time I either chatted up someone in front of me in the queue, or read a book -- the most reading I've done in 11 days.

Some screenings included interviews with the filmmakers which just added a greater appreciation for their work.

Here are my brief reviews in the order in which I saw the films:

Farruquito: a Flamenco Dynasty (2025)

I've always found flamenco dancing fascinating because of its raw emotion and intense endurance, which is why I picked this documentary. Farruquito is the stage name of Juan Manuel Fernandez Montoya, the third generation to dance in his family.

It was his grandfather Farruco who was a legend for creating his own steps that were inspired by nature, like horses' hooves as they run on the grasslands. He had one son who was destined to be great -- Farruquito -- but he died at the age of 18 in a car accident.

But when the young Montoya showed talent in dancing, he inherited his uncle's stage name and learned dancing from his grandfather, and music from his guitar-playing father. The budding Farrquito became quite the celebrity in Spain.

The documentary is filled with a treasure trove of old videos of the grandfather, and of Farruquito as a child -- watching them gives viewers an insight into how he learned from his master, and also the family dynamics. At the same time the film doesn't hold back on confronting Farruquito's demons and how he must reconcile them to move forward.

There is already a fourth generation coming up -- Farruquito's son, who is a teenager and beginning to develop his own style of dancing, which Farruquito is more than encouraging. 

Some of the present-day scenes are staged, but for the most part viewers get to know most of the key family members and their own take on what it's like to be part of this flamenco dynasty.

Farruquito: a Flamenco Dynasty

Directed by Santi Aguado Reuben Atlas

90 minutes

Review: Spring After Spring

Vancouver Chinatown parades always include Chinese dancing

Just in time for Chinese New Year is a new documentary called Spring After Spring, about three sisters who continue their mother's legacy of preserving and promoting Chinese dancing in Vancouver.

Directed by Jon Chiang, the film pays tribute to Maria Mimi Ho, who founded the Strathcona Chinese Dance Company, and helped start the Lunar New Year Chinatown Parade, where her students dressed up in colourful costumes and danced along the route.

Lisa, Val and Anabel talk about their mother

She roped her three daughters into dancing too, and they all became professionals in their on right -- eldest Anabel founded the Vancouver Academy of Dance, teaching Chinese dancing; middle child Val, aka Ms Vee is a hip hop dancer who teaches at Juillard; and youngest Lisa made it to Broadway, performing in shows like Mama Mia, Shrek and Chorus Line.

Their mother died in 2010 and left a big hole -- would the three sisters try to continue doing the Lunar New Year Chinatown parade? How would they do it? Would it be good enough in their mother's eyes?

There is a lot of archive footage of their mother, so energetic and happy as she performed -- she was a school teacher, but her hobby was dancing despite having no formal training. She studied books and later videos to learn new steps.

Ho was a force in Vancouver's Chinatown

The three sisters reminisce a lot and it's great to see them not only reveal more about their own personalities, but their mother too and how much she influenced their lives. Val is the most vocal and seems to be the most thoughtful in terms of reflecting on how she was brought up and describing the immigrant mentality of working hard all the time.

While it's clear the trio love their mother, and Anabel says it is only now, some 15 years later, that she feels comfortable speaking about her, they also remember how she was a tough Asian tiger mom, how whatever they did was never good enough.

A lot of Asian kids can relate to that kind of scolding.

That's what director Chiang hopes will spark conversation about difficult topics from viewing Spring After Spring.

"I know that from my own experiences in my family, there isn't a lot of conversation around the topic [of grief]," says Chiang. 

The three sisters are professional dancers

"There's so many taboos, there's a lot of cultural hurdles to overcome. But I feel like maybe by watching this film, people can see their families through this film and maybe not be afraid to talk about difficult things, both in the Chinese diaspora but also in other immigrant families and other Canadian families as well."

He discovered the story of Ho from his friend who is Anabel's husband, and filmed it with a lot of care and thoughtfulness, giving everyone an opportunity to talk. However, their widower father doesn't say anything, and the film focuses on the three sisters. 

Nevertheless, it was great for Chiang to encourage them to dance one of their favourite ones their mother got them to perform as a group. It shows the sisters united, passionate and happy dancing and enjoying each other's company.

Spring After Spring

Directed by Jon Chiang

78 minutes

Delightful Dance Twist on a Christmas Classic

Students put on a fun, re-imagined Nutcracker show

This evening we went to see "Mixed Nuts", a performance put on by the dance students at Arts Umbrella at the Vancouver Playhouse. Instead of the traditional take on the Christmas classic The Nutcracker, this one is reimagined and features not only ballet, but also modern dance and some contemporary elements like hockey and snowboarding!

The students range in age from teens to early 20s, with the latter taking on most of the dances, mostly ballet in the second half. The story has Clara and a "godfather" Drosselmeyer character, but it's actually a cross-dressing male dancer, dressed in a frilly blouse and black coat and strutting in high heels. After the intermission he becomes like a fairy godmother in a white dress, again in those white heels.

Male and female parts are danced by both the young men and women in the corps -- the girls have their hair pinned up and wear trousers and shirts, or in some parts the boys don a skirt with leggings underneath. There's even a sugar plum fairy dance -- and there's a male fairy complete with wings and a tiara like the others.

This dance was inspired by peppermint swirls

The theme is candy, so dances are inspired by peppermint swirls, Hershey's Kisses, cupcakes, gingerbread men and black licorice.

The gender-bending playful show is fantastic, normalising the opportunity for young men and women to dance each others' roles. That said, the line stops at the classical ballet dances, where they dance their traditional parts.

One dance featured the can-can, and the audience couldn't help but clap along, while they laughed as two (female) dancers pretended to be hockey players comically fighting each other. 

We sat at the third last row (the row behind us was empty, and the last row were the instructors and a video and cameraman). As the show progressed, the teachers were unabashed in praising their students out loud, while the audience, mostly made of parents and relatives of the performers clapped or hollered.

Most of the dancers looked like they enjoyed themselves on stage. One pas de deux featuring an Asian girl was fantastic and she smiled as she nailed all her moves. That dance reminded me of what made me love about ballet when I was a child, but also all the hard work that goes into being able to dance like that!

Partway through the show, I couldn't help thinking, these kids are going to be alright. They demonstrated how hard they had worked on the show; they apparently know all the parts and are assigned which ones they will dance just before the performance starts. 

Amazing.

Review: Shall We Dance?

Light-hearted Japanese comedy with lots of dancing 

Many years ago in Hong Kong, my friend YTSL suggested I watch a 1996 Japanese film called Shall We Dance? and I remembered it was funny. Fast forward to today and saw it was being shown in Vancouver so I went to rewatch it and there were so many details I had forgotten!

A Japanese salaryman, Shohei Sugiyama (Koji Yakusho) has just bought a house in the suburbs with his wife and teenage daughter, but he feels his life is missing something. On the train on the way home, he looks up to see a beautiful woman looking out the window of a dance studio.

A funny cast of characters with their own stories

Sugiyama works up the courage to go there and inquire about lessons; she is Mai Kishikawa (Tamiyo Kusakari), who turns out to be a professional competitive dancer, though he begins taking group lessons from an older, kindly woman.

Comedy ensues with the two other male students, and Sugiyama discovers his colleague from work has an alter ego on the dance floor, particularly when it comes to Latin dance.

But Sugiyama gets the hang of dancing and begins to enjoy it immensely -- but doesn't dare tell his wife and daughter. However, his wife gets suspicious when she smells perfume on his clothes and hires a private detective to find out what's going on...

The name of the film takes the line from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I in the film adaptation starring Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr.

I had forgotten how amusing the various characters were, from the dance classmates, Sugiyama's colleague, and the bitchy Toyoko Tanaka (Eriko Watanabe), who seems to see through everyone.

Secretly practicing in the office bathroom

And it turns out every character also has a story to tell about why they became obsessed with dance, some delivering monologues that further reveal their personality and motivation to dramatic effect.

The light-hearted film gives a nice introduction to the world of ballroom dancing, the culture and what it takes to compete. Even Mai learns more about herself, coming to terms with her mistakes in the past.

The main message of Shall We Dance? is to not be afraid to demonstrate your passion for something, because that will make you happy. 

Even though the film is almost 30 years old, it has aged well (OK apart from few big shoulder pads). 

Shall We Dance?

Directed by Masayuki Suo

1996

136 mins

Vancouver Chinatown Festival

Kids learning how to do the dragon dance

Today a friend and I checked out the 21st annual Vancouver Chinatown Festival. I was surprised to find out it had been going on for so long, but by the crowds it looks like it's an annual favourite.

I arrived a bit before 11am and stalls were still being set up and young children getting ready to dance on the main stage which was at Keefer and Columbia streets. There were even kids trying out the mini lions to see how they worked while others hit the drums. 

Bannock or fried dough with jam

When things got rolling a few minutes later, there were lots of things for kids to do, including a petting zoo (all goats), face painting, crafts and giant Connect Four. Speaking of games there was also a giant mahjong set. We watched some people play and it was definitely not a game of speed, as two hands were needed to carry the tile to each player, but it was fun to see.

And what's a festival without food? There were lots of delicious options a block long on Keefer Street, not limited to Chinese food. There were Japanese snacks and buns, nuts and chocolate, creme brulee in pots, sushi tacos -- the nori deep-fried in the shape of a taco shell with various fillings, beaver tails (fried dough with sweet toppings to choose from), ice cream, pizza slices and hot dogs with Asian fillings. 

One stall featured bannock -- an indigenous snack made from fried dough that could be eaten with either butter, jam or peanut butter as the basic one, or more substantial like a sandwich. We tried the former and it was delicious freshly made.

Interestingly we tried some alcohol made from rice! The owner and maker had several products like rice sherry (quite smooth), rice wine like makgeolli, but thinner, and more impressive -- rice whisky! He had a smooth one which was indeed easy to drink, and the classic that had a bit of a burn at the end but not fiery hot. They are made in Delta.

A giant mahjong game in progress

We also saw our friend selling chilli sauce made with duck fat, and seemed to get a lot of interest from people, some of them purchasing jars. They only started two years ago and are slowly building up their brand and scaling up with a central kitchen. They are constantly looking for ways to improve themselves which is a great attitude to have.

Meanwhile on the main stage there was lots of dancing, from traditional Chinese (with really screechy music!), Hawaiian and Kpop style. The performances seemed to look better on the big screen than watching on stage for some reason.

Interestingly there was an electric car we could have a test ride in. It's called Lucid and one passerby wondered if it had a connection with Lucifer(!), but the guy tried to explain that the word "lucid" means "clear", but the passerby kept insisting it had devilish connotations...

Interested in riding an electric car called Lucid?

The look of the car is very sleek and inside it has a lot of screens and even a 360-degree view of the car! It's very smooth and can even self brake! I was shocked to hear the price for the base model which we rode in is C$121,000... 

Afterwards we took a break and had lunch at DD Mau, a Vietnamese restaurant on East Pender. It's long and narrow with a casual vibe and nice, friendly atmosphere. We ordered the tumeric dill fish with vermicelli that came with fermented shrimp paste.

The fish was slightly more salty than I'd like, though when eaten together with the vermicelli it balanced it out. 

We also tried the crab pockets which mixed the crab meat with pork in a deep-fried shell and seasoned with fish sauce. The pockets themselves were too tough and had to be softened with the fish sauce before eating. There was only a hint of crab meat in the filling that included thin strips of wood ear mushrooms and carrots.

Crab pockets with fish sauce at DD Mau

After we emerged from the restaurant over an hour later, we were well rested and cooled down from the heat. I was surprised to spend so much time there, but it was a nice way to connect with the neighbourhood and experience some new things!