IOU (Qing bu Zou de Men Shen, 請不走的門神)
Director – Steven Zhang Zhonghua – 2026 – China – 103m
*****
Two kids whose father has left are harassed by one of his creditors, who starts to take an interest in their welfare – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 30th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival
This is set in a small village in China: for village, for which read something about the size of an English market town, not dissimilar to the milieu of Black Dog (Guan Hu, 2023). It’s essentially a three-hander: a young teenage girl and her little brother have been abandoned by their father (presumably a single parent, since we never hear anything about the mother) and have to fend for themselves.
Yinxiu (Amy Zhao), the girl, whose name translates as Silver Flower, and Jinlong (Liang Zhongyao), the boy, whose name translates as Golden Dragon, have the family property, which is a good start, but are otherwise living from hand to mouth in abject poverty. As the former explains in voiceover at the start, their father left to evade a series of bad debts incurred by setting up a home for racing pigeons, a popular sport in the village, which seemed like a good way to make some money at the time.… Read the rest