Icarus Films and the
KimStim Collection will be teaming up on Oct. 9 for the domestic DVD debut of writer/director
Vivian Qu’s critically-heralded and award-winning sexual-abuse thriller, Angels
Wear White.
China’s Hainan Island,
home of tropical beaches and resorts, is the location for Qu’s tale of power,
corruption and sexual assault, but as is often the case, the abuse of young
women and girls — the sex-trafficking trade — is certainly international in
scope.
It is here that we meet
Mia (Vicky Chen — Blood of Youth, For a Few Bullets), a cleaning “maid” for one
of the local resort hotels, who is filling in as the night clerk for a fellow
employee. She is just a teen herself
and something of a drifter — she lives in the shadows.
On this particular shift,
her antenna go up when a middle-age man, whose identity will be revealed in the
aftermath of the evening’s events, has a couple of school girls with him. Young girls, older man … that spells
trouble.
The hotel has security
cameras, but Mia suspects that if there is trouble, real trouble, those tapes
might just disappear, so she uses her cell phone to tape the man entering the
girl’s room.
All hell breaks loose as
the girls are in fact sexually assaulted, their parents are furious and the
hotel is in a state of chaos. Mia, has
it all on video, but knows that she can’t go to the authorities or her own
status would be revealed. What to do?
The mother of one of the
girls, Xiaowen (Zhou Meijun), reacts to the medical examiner’s news by
assaulting her own child — punished for being assaulted. The other girl, Xinxin (Zhang Xinyue), finds
that her parents after their initial anger are more than willing to just let
the matter go (for reasons that will become crystal clear).
There will be no justice
for either child … unless Mia takes matters into her own hands. Doing that, as she learns — despite a
“crusading” prosecutor (played by Shi Ke — Heaven Eternal, Earth Everlasting, The
Postmodern Life of My Aunt) — can be dangerous, especially when those
in power are more than willing to destroy evidence and protect one their own.
A picturesque resort,
corruption and sexual abuse … a deadly mixture in filmmaker Vivian Qu’s Angels
Wear White, which could be about the same type of crimes just about
anywhere.
Angels Wear White is presented in Mandarin with English subtitles.
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