General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Send Me to the Clouds

Send Me to the Clouds (送我上青云) is a 2019 Chinese drama film directed and written by Teng Congcong (滕丛丛), starring Yao Chen as a 29-year-old journalist who, after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer, takes a ghostwriting job to pay for surgery and sets out to seek love and desire before the operation takes her capacity for sexual pleasure.¹^•² It premiered on 17 June 2019 at the Shanghai International Film Festival and opened in mainland Chinese cinemas on 16 August 2019.² The film became one of the most discussed Chinese releases of 2019 because of its frank treatment of a woman's sexual desire, and debate over whether it is a feminist film followed it through its theatrical run.³

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Teng Congcong, her feature directorial debut; produced by Dun He, photographed by Lin Liangzhong¹
Lead cast	Yao Chen (Sheng Nan, also producer), Yuan Hong (Liu Guangming), Li Jiuxiao (Mao Cui), Liang Guanhua (Li Ping), Yang Xinming (Old Li), Wu Yufang (Liang Meizhi)⁴
Release	Premiere 17 June 2019, Shanghai International Film Festival; mainland release 16 August 2019; 99 minutes, Mandarin²
Premise	Journalist Sheng Nan, diagnosed with ovarian cancer, needs 300,000 yuan for surgery and ghostwrites an autobiography for an entrepreneur's father¹^•⁵
Title source	The line "好风凭借力，送我上青云" ("A good wind, by its power, sends me up to the clouds"), written by Xue Baochai in Dream of the Red Chamber⁴
Early box office	12.2 million yuan by 20 August 2019, with screening share rising from 2.3% on opening day to 3.1%⁶
Nominations	Best Director and Best Film, Asian New Talent Awards, 22nd Shanghai International Film Festival; nominations at the 32nd Golden Rooster Awards²

Spoilers

Plot

Sheng Nan is an independent, hard-driving journalist who longs for true love but remains single. While investigating a fire, she learns it was arson covered up by the businessman Li Ping, who packaged himself as a firefighting hero; soon afterward she is diagnosed with ovarian cancer and needs a costly operation.³^•⁷ Her family cannot help her: her father has taken a mistress and her mother, Liang Meizhi, is emotionally immature, having married at nineteen without understanding what marriage meant.²^•⁸ To raise the surgery fee, she accepts work she dislikes, ghostwriting an autobiography for Li Ping's elderly father, and travels with her mother into the misty mountains of Guizhou, where the old man lives.²^•⁹

Learning that the operation may cost her the ability to experience sexual pleasure, Sheng Nan begins a search for desire. She is drawn to Liu Guangming, a photography enthusiast she meets while interviewing Old Li, and tells him directly that she wants to sleep with him; the courtship fails, and after further disappointments she sleeps with her old colleague Mao Cui.²^•⁷ The film ends with her coming to terms with the world in her own way.²

Production

Teng Congcong, born in 1985, studied directing at the Beijing Film Academy under the director Xie Fei, worked as an editor on commercial films from 2009, and had won short-film awards at the fifth Asia International Youth Film Festival and the Hannover Up-and-coming Film Festival.¹^•¹⁰ She wrote the script between 2013 and 2017, and it entered the venture session (创投会) of the FIRST Young Film Festival in 2014.¹⁰^•¹ She said the impulse came from her own experience around age thirty, when effort seemed futile and the women around her faced health, relationship, and career problems that Chinese screens rarely depicted; she interviewed female journalists to build the character, and only Sheng Nan's profession is based on research, the rest being invented.⁶^•¹¹

Yao Chen's involvement shaped the project's fortunes. When the producer Dun He brought her the script, she agreed quickly, recruited experienced cinematography, sound, and editing staff, and made it the first feature controlled by her company Bad Rabbit Pictures (坏兔子影业); she served as lead actress and producer.⁶ Jiang Zhiqiang of Edko Films decided to invest the day after reading the script, and the film became one of the first projects of the ART art-film support plan, with twelve companies ultimately sharing production credit.⁶ Shooting took place in Guizhou from December 2017.²

Reception and the feminism debate

The film opened to modest screening counts but strong word of mouth; after its first weekend, daily box office rose rather than fell, and Maoyan's final-box-office forecast roughly tripled.⁵ By 20 August 2019 it had earned 12.2 million yuan.⁶

The public conversation centered on gender. The sociologist Li Yinhe said after a screening that the film contains the first female masturbation scene on the Chinese screen and praised it for asserting a woman's right to face love and desire on her own terms.⁵^•¹² At the premiere, Yao Chen called the film "honest" and Teng Congcong called it "brave".¹⁰ At the same time, the release offended some viewers on both sides: some male viewers felt insulted because the film's men are portrayed as greedy for money or sex, while a small number of female viewers felt uncomfortable at women speaking openly about sex.⁶ The distributor itself tried to downplay the sexual content, promoting the film with the slogan "端庄上映" ("a dignified release").¹²

Critics divided over whether the film earned its feminist label. A Jiemian review argued that it neither honestly depicts women's real social situation nor clearly identifies the mechanisms that demean female desire, leaving viewers lost among entangled themes of love, family, and ideals.¹³ A review in The Beijing News' Book Review Weekly argued that the film treats "woman" as a selling point and satisfies the self-regard of urban middle-class women rather than exploring embodied female experience.⁵ Others read it more broadly: a Southern Weekly piece argued that Sheng Nan's setbacks in health, work, family, and desire could belong to either gender, making the film more precisely a film told from a female perspective about a dispirited cast of characters than a film about gender injustice.⁸ A study in Chinese Film News placed Sheng Nan, an unmarried, childless urban woman, as a counterpart to the three mothers of Lost, Found, together forming a fuller picture of contemporary women constrained by patriarchal prejudice, career anxiety, and material hardship.¹⁴

Teng Congcong later said she knew little of feminist theory when she wrote the script and encountered those concepts only through audience reactions after release; she also noted that early viewers accused her of misandry, while later commentary increasingly read all the film's characters, male and female, as victims of patriarchal structures.¹⁵

Awards

At the 22nd Shanghai International Film Festival the film was nominated for Best Film and Teng Congcong for Best Director in the Asian New Talent Awards, and it received nominations at the 32nd Golden Rooster Awards; 1905.com records two wins and five nominations overall.²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2015 to 2019 › Drama films 2019

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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