Yan Siyu Debut 'Outside the Room of My Own' Debuts at SIFF
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- Yan Siyu's debut feature 'Outside the Room of My Own' follows a Beijing writer who travels with her mother and grandmother to Chengdu and the village of Luding, with the three-generation journey unfolding 'against a backdrop of social and economic uncertainty' per the filmmaker.
- Yan frames the project, inspired by Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own,' as asking not how a woman becomes 'independent' but how 'I can reshape my subjectivity through my relationships with others,' approaching Chinese women's experience 'in a non-binary way.'
- Lucie Zhang, who earned a César Most Promising Actress nomination for Jacques Audiard's 'Paris, 13th District' in 2022, signed on after Yan saw her in the Cannes Directors' Fortnight short 'Nervous Energy,' with Yan citing Zhang's 'sharp, combative' quality.
- Veteran actor Yue Hong, a two-time China Golden Rooster Award winner, plays Yuan's mother, while Wang Caiping — recently in Zhang Lu's Tokyo competition title 'Mothertongue' — plays the grandmother.
- The creative team includes editor Kong Jinglei, whose credits include Jia Zhangke's 'Still Life' and Diao Yinan's 'The Wild Goose Lake,' and cinematographer Tao Qiu, whose short 'All the Crows in the World' won the Short Film Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2021.
- Producer Peng Jin says the rough-cut project is seeking international distribution partners plus collaborators for sound design, original score, and color grading, and needs support for a planned summer exterior shoot.
- Yan, who was born in Chengdu and trained at Beijing Film Academy after undergraduate studies at Denison University, calls the film 'the first step I have taken as a filmmaker in trying to build an aesthetic system of my own.'
Why it matters: A work-in-progress screening at SIFF Project is the festival's marketplace for films still assembling financing and creative teams, meaning the project is actively courting the international sales agents, co-producers, and sound/music collaborators it still lacks. The cast pairing a César-nominated French star with a two-time Golden Rooster winner signals genuine cross-border ambition rather than a token co-production, and the presence of crew credits tied to Jia Zhangke and a Cannes Palme d'Or short gives distributors a recognizable creative pedigree to sell.
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