There is a 20-year-old girl with three faces – a university student without much ambition, a diligent part-time promoter, and a dutiful daughter who offers her baby as compensation for her mother.

Co-directed by Japanese husband OTSUKA Ryuji and Chinese wife HUANG Ji, Stonewalling is a black comedy about the events surrounding a university student’s pregnancy. Lynn dreams of becoming a flight attendant, but while looking for the cause of her sudden chest pain, she finds out she is pregnant. She returns to her hometown to deal with this situation. She decides to help with the debts that her mother has incurred due to her medical malpractice while running an unreliable maternity clinic. The film casts a critical eye on the legacy of the one-child policy remaining in Chinese society, with ova trading and surrogate mothers, and questions about the myth of motherhood itself. It also humorously and slyly points out that pregnancy and childbirth are not financially free in the present-day capitalist society. The two directors’ efforts to leave resonance through a cinematic metaphor, such as Lynn’s chest pain, are remarkable. (MOON Seok)