Acclaimed Chinese language actor Lyric Lan is about to collaborate with rising filmmaker Lam Can-zhao on his newest challenge “The Numbered Girls.”

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 position of the van driver.

“The Numbered Girls” represents the newest proof-of-concept challenge from Lam Can-zhao, the Chaozhou-born director whose brief 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, typically exploring the emotional aftermath of China’s mass rural-urban migration wave.

The challenge continues Lam’s trajectory of inspecting lives of close to invisibility, this time specializing in grownup girls who, like the kids in his earlier movies, exist on society’s margins. The director has distinguished himself as the primary filmmaker to convey the Chaozhou dialect to worldwide movie competition screens, utilizing his native dialect and private historical past as a lens for inspecting modern Chinese language id.

“I left my village at 18, but it surely took me a decade to return with a digicam,” Lam says about his hometown in Chaozhou. “I regularly got here to grasp that my bond with my hometown was strongly linked to my id as a filmmaker.”

The collaboration comes as Lam’s 2025 function “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 attributable to rural-to-urban migration, divorce, or emotional distance. The challenge incorporates a particular look by Chinese language singer and actor Jin Sha.

“The Numbered Girls” is co-produced by Jessica Shi, who outlined the challenge’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 – nonetheless temporary – is what provides them again their humanity.”