| Director: | Elizabeth Lo |
|---|---|
| Production: | Marcona Media (Emma D. Miller), After Argos Films (Elizabeth Lo), Maggie Li |
| Running Time: | 94' |
| Language: | Mandarin Chinese |
| Country: | China, USA |
| Year: | 2024 |
| Main Cast: | (Documentary film) |
| Cinematographer: | Elizabeth Lo |
| Editor: | Charlotte Munch Bengtsen |
| Music: | Brian McOmber |
| Sound: | Derek Chen, Nathan Ruyle |
| As themselves: | Wang Zhenxi |
|---|
In China, a new industry has emerged devoted to helping couples stay married in the face of infidelity. Wang Zhenxi is part of this growing profession, a “mistress dispeller” who is hired to maintain the bonds of marriage—and break up affairs— by any means necessary. Offering strikingly intimate access to private dramas usually hidden behind closed doors, Mistress Dispeller follows a real, unfolding case of infidelity as Teacher Wang attempts to bring a couple back from the edge of crisis. Their story shifts our sympathies between husband, wife and mistress to explore the ways emotion, pragmatism and cultural norms collide to shape romantic relationships in contemporary China.
I have loved romance movies for as long as I can remember. Yet my experience of love within my own family was markedly different from what I saw represented in popular cinema. In my home, love was bound up with sacrifice, duty and what’s left unsaid. As a director, I wanted to see this specific kind of love through my own camera, and use a crisis of infidelity as my entryway to discover how emotion is expressed and experienced in my culture. The film is set within the world of mistress dispelling, a new “love industry” specialised in ending affairs between married spouses and their extramarital lovers that has only emerged within the last decade in China (a response to rising rates of adultery that have ballooned alongside its economy). For a fee that can start at tens of thousands of dollars, a mistress dispeller is typically hired for two to three months by a wife to infiltrate a mistress’s life—to gain the mistress’s confidence under a false identity and influence her to end the affair of her own accord. My aim was to craft a Rashōmon-inspired romance that empathetically portrayed all sides of a love triangle. In an era of increasing polarisation between the US and China, it was important to me as a Hong Kong citizen to make a documentary film that bridges this divide rather than alienating people and cultures from one another. By investigating an experience that is at once universally familiar and uniquely specific to contemporary China, I hope to ask what it means to hurt, to heal, to fear loneliness, and to love, in the 21st century.
PRODUCTION 1: Marcona Media – Emma D. Miller
482 Dustin Drive
90065, Los Angeles, United States of America
Tel. 1 305-975-4426
emma@marconamedia.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mistressdispellerfilm/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mistressdispellerfilm1
PRODUCTION 2: After Argos Films – Elizabeth Lo.
3117 Minnesota St.
90031, Los Angeles, United States of America
Tel. 1 917-291-0538
elizabethx.lo@gmail.com
PRODUCTION 3: Maggie Li
Tel. 86 8862141081
maggielishanghai@gmail.com
NORTH AMERICAN SALES: Nick Shumaker - Anonymous Content
155 Spring St
10012, New York, United States of America
Tel. 1 646-565-3749
NShumaker@anonymouscontent.com
NORTH AMERICAN SALES: Josh Braun - Submarine Entertainment
197 Grand Street, New York 10013, United States
Tel: 1 212-625-1410
info@submarine.com
WORLD SALES: Estelle De Araujo – The Party Film Sales
16 rue Frochot, 75009 Paris, France
+33 1 76 21 51 77
sales@thepartysales.com
https://www.thepartysales.com/
PRESS OFFICE: Susan Norget - Susan Norget Film Promotion
80 Charles St.
10014, New York, United States of America
Tel. 1 917-833-3056
susan@norget.com
