BAREFOOT
What happens when a name becomes a sentence? Barefoot follows one woman walking back through the word “laolai.”
Watch on YouTube ↗A label is never the whole story.
In China, they are called — deadbeats, blacklisted by the courts.
But a court record is a single frame. Zhou is a mother, a friend, and a woman still moving forward after everything that could hold her up has been taken away.
Zhou was detained wrongfully, betrayed by her best friend, abandoned by her husband and parents, and left to fight her way back for the sake of her two children.
This film stays close to her voice. It asks what we lose when a public label is allowed to stand in for a private life.
noun · a person listed by the courts as a judgment defaulter. In everyday speech, a word loaded with contempt.
The distance between a word and a woman.
Three years ago, at a family dinner, I heard my father, a lawyer, describe a case involving a “laolai.” It was the first time I had heard the word, and I remember exactly what I felt: an unexamined contempt.
A year later, I sat across from Zhou in an office and interviewed her. She had once lived in Lujiazui, two kilometers from the Oriental Pearl Tower; now she was officially blacklisted as a judgment defaulter. But her downfall began not with dishonesty. It began with trust: a best friend who led her into a predatory scheme, a husband who fled with the evidence that could clear her, parents whose bags were already packed when she came home from detention.
One image from her story never left me. On the day of her release, having given her shoes away to the women still inside, she walked out of the detention center barefoot — no phone, no money, borrowing a stranger’s cell on the street to call a cab.
Stripped of everything, she was still walking forward.— Muying “Cathy” Zhu, director
See the film.
When the film is ready to share, paste its YouTube link here. The screening room will open it in place.
A documentary by Muying “Cathy” Zhu
Shanghai / Wellesley, Massachusetts