Acclaimed Chinese actor Lyric Lan is set to collaborate with rising filmmaker Lam Can-zhao on his latest project “The Numbered Women.”
The socially-driven drama, which begins production this August, follows two marginalized women – a Chinese van driver and a Vietnamese massage worker – whose lives briefly intersect in a remote town in Southern China. Lan, who rose to prominence with her breakout performance in the television series “Empresses in the Palace,” will take on the role of the van driver.
“The Numbered Women” represents the latest proof-of-concept project from Lam Can-zhao, the Chaozhou-born director whose short films have found recognition at the Berlinale and Pingyao. At just 20, Lam made his directorial debut with “The Dog” and has since built a reputation for centering rural lives and forgotten voices in his work, often exploring the emotional aftermath of China’s mass rural-urban migration wave.
The project continues Lam’s trajectory of examining lives of near invisibility, this time focusing on adult women who, like the children in his earlier films, exist on society’s margins. The director has distinguished himself as the first filmmaker to bring the Chaozhou dialect to international film festival screens, using his native dialect and personal history as a lens for examining contemporary Chinese identity.
“I left my village at 18, but it took me a decade to return with a camera,” Lam says about his hometown in Chaozhou. “I gradually came to understand that my bond with my hometown was strongly linked to my identity as a filmmaker.”
The collaboration comes as Lam’s 2025 feature “Moments Like These” recently wrapped post-production. The film brings together four distinct yet interconnected stories set in the same village, each exploring the bittersweet journey of growing up and capturing the resilience of children left behind due to rural-to-urban migration, divorce, or emotional distance. The project features a special appearance by Chinese singer and actor Jin Sha.
“The Numbered Women” is co-produced by Jessica Shi, who outlined the project’s thematic ambitions. “We wanted to tell a story that not only addresses gender, labor, and migration,” said Shi, “but also asks what it means to live a life marked by numbers, not names. The moment of connection between these two women – however brief – is what gives them back their humanity.”
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