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SHE DANCES BY THE SEA

TA ZAI SI YUE TIAO WU

By Jian FAN, Isabella ZANG

STRANGER FILMS SALES - as SALES All rights, World

Documentary - Completed 2024

Six years after her divorce, Xiuhua Yu — China’s most famous disabled poet — starts a new relationship and finds herself embroiled in a spiral of domestic violence, online controversy and creative struggles.

- Year of production
- 2024
- Genres
- Documentary, Biography, Social issues
- Countries
- CHINA, NETHERLANDS
- Languages
- CHINESE
- Duration
- 107 mn
- Director(s)
- Jian FAN, Isabella ZANG
- Synopsis
- Xiuhua Yu, the most famous contemporary poet in China, has published six books which have sold over two million copies. She was born with cerebral palsy in rural China and, after graduating high school, entered a loveless arranged marriage at the age of 19. In 2007, Yu began writing poetry seriously, and in 2014, after her poem “Crossing Half of China to Sleep with You” went viral, she published her first collection of poems, became financially independent, and ended her 20-year marriage.
  Yu once said, “When I want love, my disability is the only thing that makes me feel unworthy…All these years, I’ve wanted to find someone I can love.” For the past ten years, we’ve shared an intimate friendship with Yu, and been with her through ups and downs, including her many attempts to find love.
  In 2022, at the age of 46, Yu fell in love for the first time. The relationship was heavily scrutinized and massively controversial from its beginnings. Yu courageously defended herself and the relationship as she delighted in the new love she’d found. However, as the relationship developed, the compromises she made for love left her tangled in a harrowing dilemma…