Giving a child a new name and expecting the old life to disappear with it is simply cruel. A name is supposed to tell us who somebody is, yet in Zou Jing’s A Girl Unknown, names become evidence of how often one young girl has been asked to begin again.
Six years old when we first meet her, she will pass through three families before reaching adulthood, and with each move comes another home, another version of motherhood and another identity she is expected to accept. She is Lin Juan, then Wang Juan, eventually Wu Lian, although none of those names can quite contain everything that has happened to her. What Zou understands in her impressive first feature is that children do not start from zero simply because adults rearrange their lives. They remember who left them, who promised to return, which house once felt like home and the exact moment when they realised that a decision had been made about their future without anybody asking them.
Playing at the 70th BFI London Film Festival in London, A Girl Unknown comes with considerable recognition behind it. Zou’s screenplay had already been developed through Cannes Critics’ Week’s Next Step programme, and the finished film premiered in competition at Critics’ Week in 2026, where it received the FIPRESCI Prize and the Gan Foundation Award for Distribution. Yet the scale of the story remains deliberately intimate.
The story has very personal beginnings for Zou; her paternal grandmother, who helped raise her, had herself been abandoned shortly after birth in 1936 and taken in by another family. Zou only discovered this after her grandmother had died. Years later, she came across the story of parents searching for a daughter they had previously given away, only to discover that the girl had subsequently ended up with another adoptive family. The filmmaker then spoke with women born in the late 1980s who had lived through similar experiences.
That history is important, because there is much more behind A Girl Unknown than China’s one-child policy alone. By the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s and 1990s, restrictions on the number of children families could have, combined with a long-standing preference for sons, left many girls particularly vulnerable. While researching the film, Zou encountered women of her own generation with similar stories, including cases in which a second daughter could be quietly given away and begin another life with another family. It makes Juan’s journey even more painful to watch, knowing that what happened to her was but an experience that other girls of her generation had also lived through.
It is an uncomfortable piece of recent history, and A Girl Unknown approaches it from the place where statistics become inadequate – what does being given away actually do to a child?
Juan begins life in the countryside, where Cao Ruofan plays her with the wonderful physical freedom of a child who has not yet learned to be suspicious of happiness. When she is taken away from that world and left with another couple in the city, the adults know far more about what is happening than she does. Juan does not receive the kind of explanation an adult might demand before changing their entire life; she simply has to live with the result. The gap between what the adults decide and what Juan understands is always present, as they talk, argue, withhold information, disappear and return while she is left trying to understand what each change means for her. It creates an unsettling sense that, from Juan’s perspective, no home can ever be assumed to be permanent.
The move from Cao Ruofan’s younger Juan to Li Gengxi as the adolescent girl is especially effective because the change is emotional as well as physical. Something in her has closed; the lively child has become a young woman who has learnt that attachment is risky, and Li gives a beautifully contained performance, rarely reaching for an obvious emotional display when a guarded expression or refusal to respond will do more. Anger and indifference become difficult to separate, as at times, Juan appears almost determined to reject affection before affection gets another opportunity to reject her.
And this is where Shen Jiani, as Ding Meishuang, becomes crucial to the film. Meishuang wants to mother Juan, but love in A Girl Unknown is never presented as a magical corrective to abandonment. She can feed her, worry about her, enrol her in dance classes, take her places and try to create the routines of ordinary family life, but she cannot erase the woman Juan still thinks of as her mother, nor can she demand gratitude simply because she has stayed where somebody else left. Their relationship becomes one of the film’s richest because neither side is emotionally simple. Meishuang’s love can be genuine and still feel suffocating to a girl who never chose this family; Juan can desperately need affection and still punish the person offering it. Shen is superb at showing how exhausting that contradiction becomes. There is hurt in Meishuang, sometimes frustration and resentment too, because caring for a child does not automatically mean that the child will love you in the way you imagined. Zou allows that discomfort to remain and does not turn the adoptive mother into a saint, nor Juan into an ungrateful daughter.
Zu Feng, playing Wang Weiqiang, brings another tension into that household, where grief and unresolved difficulties between the adults make Juan’s supposed place of safety considerably less secure than it first appears. The important point is that each new family offers Juan something, but each also asks something from her.
I think that the film’s strongest idea may therefore be contained in those changing names: Lin Juan, Wang Juan and Wu Lian. For the adults, a new name means Juan belongs to a new family; for her, it means somebody has changed her life yet again. By the time her biological family returns, the idea of “going home” is no longer simple, because knowing where she came from cannot give her back the childhood she spent elsewhere.
By the end, the title A Girl Unknown seems to belong as much to Juan herself as to the way others have seen her. After three families and three names, she is left to work out which parts of those lives are truly hers and what home actually means after being moved from one to another. What remained with me is not simply the fact that Juan was abandoned, but how much of her life was decided by other people before she was old enough to have any say in it, and how, as a young woman, she finally begins to decide for herself who she wants to be.
A Girl Unknown is a beautifully written and directed film.
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Written by Maggie Gogler
Featured image courtesy of PYRAMIDE FILMS
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