The wounds of abandonment and displacement are at the root of Zou Jing’s achingly poetic “A Girl Unknown,” a sober and quietly devastating portrayal of an adolescent girl whose identity, maybe even humanity, has been toyed with by a fractured law. That would be China’s controversial one-child policy, recently interrogated in Nanfu Wang’s stunning documentary “One Child Nation.” While “A Girl Unknown” isn’t directly an examination of the severe initiative that was introduced in 1979 to control the country’s population growth (and formally ended in early 2016, with its additional restrictions terminated in the following years), its harrowing echoes are all over Jing’s story, which spans 12 years, starting in the 1980s.
With many culturally patriarchal families favoring boys over girls as their offspring when challenged by the one-child directive, young girls were disproportionately put up for adoption and forced to exist in a vicious cycle of rejection where they had to survive their dislocation. Among those survivors is Wang Juan (Cao Ruofan), whom we meet as a no-nonsense six-year-old, experiencing the buoyancy of childhood around rural swimming holes and her welcoming, brightly lit school. Like any kid, she gets into trouble from time to time, but this tomboy isn’t the type to suffer any fools or her town’s common bullies.
