A Girl Unknown

In this gorgeous, multiple award-winning tale, a young woman comes of age and searches for her identity in the era of China’s one-child policy.

Amid the sunny splendour of 1980s coastal China, six-year-old tomboy Juan enjoys a sweet life: going to school, swimming, playing soccer, flying kites, getting into fights. But soon things are thrown into flux: her widowed mother remarries, then falls pregnant. Because families are only permitted to have a single child, Juan is quickly adopted out to an older couple in the city. A decade later, against the backdrop of the changing cultural landscape of the 1990s, a now-teenage Juan looks for a place that feels like home. When she finds that her factory work only amplifies her dislocation, she finally takes the plunge and seeks contact with her birth family.

Zou Jing (Lili Alone, MIFF 2021) sets her beautiful, difficult drama against the real-life phenomenon of mass adoption in China that followed the 1979 establishment of the one-child policy. Gorgeously shot by DOP Liang Zhongqiang and featuring stirring performances by newcomer Cao Ruofan and Li Gengxi (Resurrection, MIFF 2025) – who embody the film’s protagonist as a child and young adult respectively – A Girl Unknown earned acclaim on the Croisette, taking home three Cannes Critics’ Week awards.

Content: Melbourne International Film Festival