Winner of the Best Canadian First Feature Award at TIFF 2016, Chinese-Canadian director Johnny Ma’s thrilling feature debut takes us on an unnerving trip through China’s social strata and their corresponding levels of “justice,” telling the tale of a man whose honest act is turned against him.
For Lao Shi (Chen Gang), a taxi driver in a crowded city, every day of work is a fight for his family’s basic economic survival. One day, swerving his car because his arm is grabbed by a drunken passenger, he accidentally hits a motorcyclist. Passersby observe and take photos but don’t intervene, and when the ambulance takes too long to arrive, he decides to take the injured man to the hospital himself. But upon their arrival at the hospital, a bureaucratic nightmare quickly begins to unfold.
Unfamiliar with the laws, Lao Shi is acting on instinct. But after checking the man in, he finds that he’s become legally responsible for the hospital bills. He appeals to all available levels of government, but is consistently shut down and rendered all but voiceless. Faced with the possibility of losing everything, he descends into a kind of madness and begins to think that his only possible response to such a thankless social system might be retribution.
Jing Jing Chang, assistant professor of film studies at Laurier University specializing in Asian Film, will be on hand for a discussion of Old Stone following the screening.
The short film Last Train will be included with this screening.
