General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Orphan of Anyang (安阳婴儿)

The Orphan of Anyang (安阳婴儿; also romanized Anyang yinger or Anyang de yinger) is a 2001 Chinese drama film, the feature debut of director Wang Chao, about a laid-off factory worker in the city of Anyang, Henan, who agrees to raise a prostitute's abandoned baby for a monthly payment of 200 yuan. The film was shot without official authorization, screened in the Directors' Fortnight at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, and won the FIPRESCI grand prize at the Chicago International Film Festival.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Wang Chao, his first feature, adapted from his own short story of the same name¹^•²
Release	2001; 84 minutes; 35 mm color; Mandarin dialogue¹^•²
Setting	Anyang, an old industrial city in Henan province, around the year 2000⁴
Principal cast	Zhu Jie, Sun Guilin, and Yue Senyi; cinematography by Zhang Xi; produced by Fang Li¹^•³
Central premise	An unemployed worker cares for a prostitute's baby for 200 yuan a month, and an impromptu family forms until the dying gang boss who believes he is the father demands the child⁴
Festivals and awards	Directors' Fortnight, Cannes 2001; FIPRESCI grand prize, Chicago 2001; Best Feature, Belfort 2001; NETPAC Award, Amiens²^•³
Production	Shot in 21 days on an investment of about 1 million yuan, without official authorization⁵^•²

Spoilers

Plot

The story is set around the year 2000 in Anyang, an old city in Henan province, during a period when many factories were closing and workers were being laid off.⁴ Yu Dagang, a single worker in his forties, loses his job and cannot afford to eat; in the film's opening he trades his now-useless company meal tickets for cash to buy a bowl of noodles.³^•⁶ At a noodle stand at the night market he finds an abandoned baby boy with a note pinned to his clothes, giving a pager number and promising 200 yuan a month to whoever looks after the child.⁴

Through the pager number Dagang contacts the mother, Feng Yanli, a prostitute from Manchuria in northeast China, and they meet at a noodle restaurant.²^•⁴ What begins as an economic arrangement develops into something like a family: Dagang opens a bicycle repair stall outside his apartment building, and he invites Yanli to receive her clients in his flat while he minds the baby, watching men come and go from the street.⁴^•⁷

The arrangement collapses when the baby's presumed father, the gang boss Side (Sidan), who runs the entertainment complex where Yanli works, learns that he has a terminal illness and demands the child back so that he will have an heir.⁴^•⁸ In a confrontation, Dagang kills him by accident, is sentenced to death for manslaughter, and Yanli, caught in a police raid against prostitution, passes the baby to a stranger who appears in her flashback as Dagang.⁴

Style

Wang shot the film with a virtually stationary camera in long, fixed takes, using non-professional actors, dialect dialogue, and location sound with almost no music.⁷^•⁹ Critics compared his formal reserve to Robert Bresson, noting that he almost never cuts on movement, and the Rotterdam festival program placed him alongside Bresson, Darezhan Omirbaev, and Roberto Rossellini.¹^•¹⁰ Amy Taubin wrote in Film Comment that the film "combines the personal and the political with such subtlety that its devastating critique of the systematic abandonment of people ill-equipped to fend for themselves escaped the Chinese censors' scissors."¹

Wang himself resisted a purely realist reading. He said the ending is not a realist one, and Time Out described the close as a wish-fulfilment fantasy that softens the bleak conclusion.¹¹^•⁸

Production and censorship

Wang Chao was born in Nanjing; festival sources give his birth year as 1964, though one festival catalog gives 1965.¹²^•³ He worked in a factory for five years, graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 1994, and then spent several years as assistant to the director Chen Kaige on Farewell My Concubine and The Emperor and the Assassin, while also publishing short stories and a novella and working as a film critic.¹²^•³

An underground production. The film was shot without authorization, and as an unlicensed production it could not be distributed theatrically in China; Wang said publicly that he could give away free DVDs of the film to anyone who wanted to see it.²^•¹³ He raised the financing himself: he first turned the story into a short story published in a magazine to show prospective investors, and the first backer put in money without reading it.¹⁴ The shoot took 21 days, interrupted briefly when the municipal culture bureau came to check for a permit, on an investment of about 1 million yuan.¹⁵^•⁵ When pirated DVDs appeared, the producer was dismayed, but Wang welcomed the wider audience.⁵

Reception and place in Chinese cinema

The film premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at the 54th Cannes Film Festival in 2001 and went on to screen at festivals including Edinburgh, Vancouver, Toronto, and Rotterdam.²^•¹^•¹² It won the FIPRESCI grand prize at the 37th Chicago International Film Festival, the Best Feature award at the Belfort Film Festival, the NETPAC Award at the Amiens International Film Festival, and in 2003 the French magazine Telerama named it one of the year's 15 outstanding world films.³^•²^•¹⁶

Commentators place the film within China's independent and Sixth Generation cinema, a current of directors who worked outside the official studio system and portrayed marginalized urban lives with sharp realism.¹⁷^•¹⁸ The Vesoul festival catalog wrote that the film denounces the taboos of unemployment and misery, prostitution, and corruption in a country where every person is supposed to be supported by the government.² It became the first part of what Wang described as a loose trilogy on contemporary China, followed by Day and Night (2004) and Luxury Car (2006).¹⁶^•¹²

References

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