Girls on Wire

Director Vivian Qu serves up a well-crafted examination of what happens to two cousins, Tian Tian and Fang Di, who grow up in the time of China's One Child Policy as well as its freewheeling economic expansion. With one cousin's mother toiling away at growing the family garment manufacturing business, the other watches her father descend into addiction. In adulthood, one cousin is a risk taker in her work as a stunt double in wuxia films, sending money home to pay family debts. The other takes risks that leave her a single parent subject to exploitation by thugs who are partly drug lords and partly loan sharks. As the film progresses and we also experience flashbacks that let the audience understand the shared experiences of these two women who address each other as "sister". In addition to an exploration of a modern, woman-to-woman version of Confucian filial piety, i.e. Sisterhood, we are also treated to various suspenseful and comical episodes among the all-male gangsters. We in the audience are left to confront whether the cousins can recover the close bonds of their youth, whether they can escape the criminals in pursuit of Tian Tian, and whether dreams can come true in real life as they do in the movies.