The most anticipated cinematic opening this weekend in China isn’t the latest Hatsune Miku movie, despite the virtual idol’s huge popularity in the country. Nor is it the award-winning drama Mostly Sunny, even though that film features superstar Huang Xiaoming.
Instead, the must-see watch is After Typhoon, an arthouse feature directed by Li Yu and centered on female friendship, according to users of Maoyan, China’s leading ticketing platform.
“Things in China are changing,” said Yao Chen, who co-stars in the drama alongside UFC champion fighter Zhang Weili in her acting debut.
“For a long time, there have been more women than men in theaters,” said Yao, who also co-produced the film and heads Beijing-based production house Bad Rabbit Pictures. “They buy the tickets and choose the films when couples go out. But the industry has only noticed and begun to act on this recently.”
As with its counterparts in Hollywood and elsewhere, China’s film industry—Asia’s largest by revenue—has been in a funk, with box office receipts stuck well below pre-pandemic levels. Changed habits, competition with other video and entertainment content and economic uncertainty mean fewer people are going to the cinema.
For female filmmakers, this has created an opening to offer stories attuned to women’s perspectives, breaking with the Chinese movie industry’s traditional focus on “masculine” themes like war and combat.
The results are shaking up the country’s box office. YOLO, the comedic tale of a recluse overcoming personal setbacks by committing herself to boxing, emerged as last year’s surprise box office champion, taking in RMB 3.42 billion (USD 478.8 million) in domestic ticket sales, according to Maoyan. The film, a remake of the 2014 Japanese movie 100 Yen Love, stars Jia Ling, who also directed and co-wrote the screenplay.
YOLO is the first film directed by a woman to ever come out at the top of China’s annual rankings and its success was no fluke. On its heels, the drama Her Story was the unexpected hit of the 2024 year-end period, bringing in RMB 712.9 million (USD 99.8 million) from audiences taking in the tale of a single mother, her young daughter, and their female neighbor dealing with the pitfalls of life in contemporary Shanghai.
“It is certainly a crucial time for female film power to accelerate and profoundly shape the future,” declared an annual trend report published in September by China’s FIRST Fantastic Film Festival. “The tide has come in and change is underway, not only in terms of reshaping the image of women on screen, but also in terms of propelling the Chinese film industry toward true creative diversity and gender equality.”
Paradoxically, this development is taking place against the backdrop of a backlash in Beijing against feminism. Some officials have condemned feminist activists as de facto agents of Western nations seeking to weaken China. President Xi Jinping has urged women to focus on marriage and child-rearing. Meanwhile, social media influencers and even comedians have been censored for supposedly disparaging men and provoking “gender antagonism.”
Yet in the case of China’s movie business, market forces appear to be bringing female-centered narratives to the fore.
A number of recent studies, such as one by Jinyu Ding, an economics scholar at the Wuhan University of Technology, have found that women now represent about 60% of ticket buyers. This factor, Ding wrote, makes “women and [post-1995] young audiences the main force in the market.”
Indeed, while women have actually been making movies in China for a century, starting with Xie Caizhen’s film An Orphan’s Cry in 1925, their productions started to make a major box office impact only just recently.
“For example, the works of Shao Yihui and Teng Congcong have a more distinct female consciousness than the previous works of female directors, but they have also achieved success at the box office,” said Beijing-based film critic He Xiaoqin, referring to the directors of Her Story and Send Me to the Clouds (2019), respectively.
“Through this, other filmmakers will naturally gain insight into changes in public perception and market trends,” He said. “Even successful male directors are now more likely to pay attention to female perspectives and the feelings of female audiences when creating their works. … This is not an isolated phenomenon but rather a reflection of social progress.”
That is a view shared by Yang Lina, whose family drama Big World took in RMB 765.9 million (USD 107.2 million) at the box office last year.
“We have seen a lot of female filmmakers entering this industry since the late 1990s,” said Yang at the Shanghai International Film Festival in June. “I think this reflects Chinese society.
“In contemporary Chinese society, I think women are given more choices. They can either be a housewife or they can be a breadwinner. They can engage in the workforce. It is becoming the same in film, and we are starting to be given equal opportunities to compete in the industry.”
Lin Liang has observed the rise of female Chinese directors as general manager of production and project development at Emperor Motion Pictures. The company is Hong Kong’s largest film producer but also invests in productions led by mainland Chinese studios, distributing the films in its home market and in Southeast Asia.
“Women’s self-awareness has gradually awakened, and they are eager to see reflections of themselves on screen,” Lin said. “Women have also become one of the core consumer groups in the film market, and their demand for stories about their own lives, emotions and growth has been growing. At the same time, capital has sensed the potential of female creative perspectives, fueling the upsurge in the creation of women-themed works.”
In recent years, users of Chinese social media platforms popular with women such as Douban and Xiaohongshu have taken to discussing feminist themes raised by the works of female directors. “It truly feels like we’re being seen and understood,” one Xiaohongshu user wrote.
Bolstered by such audience sentiments, some female Chinese film figures have urged moviemakers to push harder for advancement.
Speaking at a forum attached to the Shanghai International Film Festival, actress and producer Liang Jing, known for her work on films such as The Eight Hundred (2020), called on women in the industry to “dare to break down walls” and not be afraid “to speak up, to find your voice.”
Yet Chinese women directors who have found box office success have largely hewed to centering their stories on female characters and their everyday lives rather than taking on political themes directly.
Jia Ling’s 2021 debut, Hi, Mom, is a prime example. A comedic fantasy about a young woman who travels two decades back in time to befriend her mother as a peer, the film took in RMB 5.42 billion (USD 758.8 million) at the box office, setting a global record for a movie directed by a solo female that stood until the arrival of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie in 2023.
The touching but funny Send Me to the Clouds, which stars Yao Chen, was more provocative, depicting Yao’s character exploring her sexuality after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
“The audience for that film was about 50-50 male-female, but I was asked by men why the men in the film are imperfect,” said Yao on the sidelines of the Shanghai festival.
“They’re not the characters that they had become used to watching on Chinese big screens: perfect men, in films about the greatness of men, about manhood,” she said. “In a lot of the films you see now, there is no longer that sort of infallible male character, and that reflects the market’s needs.”
Last year’s Her Story also pushed the envelope, argued Esther Li, co-founder of the new Hong Kong-based production house Mirage Films.
“I can now see in Chinese films a lot of topics regarding feminism, independent women [and] maybe women’s struggles,” she said at the Busan International Film Festival in September.
“These kinds of topics are being explored more, and I think maybe the women filmmakers have also been encouraged by the whole environment, not just to make films in China but to expand their horizons and look to international co-productions,” Li said. “Both festivals and potential investors [have been] really more and more focusing on women’s topics.”
Li co-produced Whisperings of the Moon, which had its world premiere at Busan. The film, which marks the directing debut of China’s Lai Yuqing, is set in Phnom Penh, features a local cast and follows the on-and-off relationship of a female actor and a married woman.
“It’s always going to be hard to get a film made—that is the nature of the business—but there are signs of hope for us all,” Li said.
Speaking alongside her, Lai said, “Making films is so hard, but throughout our production I felt all the women involved, all the team, were united by the desire to tell stories about women.”
Hailing from the northern port city of Tianjin, Lai acted and studied art and film in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto before returning to Asia to try her hand at directing features.
“I know now, going forward, there will be lots of challenges to doing a second film,” Lai said, “but that won’t stop me from trying because I can’t stop now.”
This article first appeared on Nikkei Asia. It has been republished here as part of 36Kr’s ongoing partnership with Nikkei.