Special sneak preview and Iowa premiere! Opens NY & LA in May!
Presented as part of Women's March: Vanguard Voices

Join us to kick off the "Vanguard Voices" series on Monday, March 4 at 5pm - meet our talkback leaders, learn about the series and enjoy free dumplings courtesy of Dumpling Darling!

"Supremely atmospheric." - John Berra, Screen Daily

"A gorgeously intimate, evocative, and melancholy story of female subjugation, this is a rare debut that derives its freshness not from inexperience but from a balance between compassion and restraint that most filmmakers take decades to achieve."
- Jessica Kiang, Variety

"Aesthetically entrancing, sensitively poetic." - Neil Young, the Hollywood Reporter

OFFICIAL SELECTION: Toronto International Film Festival, Palm Springs International Film Festival

Post-screening talkback led by Hyaeweol Choi - C. Maxwell and Elizabeth M. Stanley Family and Korea Foundation Chair in Korean Studies, Department of Religious Studies, University of Iowa.

In 19th century rural Vietnam, 14-year-old May becomes the third wife of wealthy landowner Hung. Soon she learns that she can only gain status by asserting herself as a woman who can give birth to a male child. May's hope to change her status turns into a real and tantalizing possibility when she gets pregnant. Faced with forbidden love and its devestating consequences, May finally comes to an understanding of the brutal truth: the options available for her are few and far between.

Hyaeweol Choi is the C. Maxwell and Elizabeth M. Stanley Family and Korea Foundation Chair in Korean Studies at the University of Iowa. Her research interests include gender and empire, modernity, religion and transnational history. She is the author of Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women, Old Ways(University of California Press, 2009) and New Women in Colonial Korea (Routledge, 2013), and a co-author of Gender in Modern East Asia: An Integrated History (Westview, 2016).