BARBIE
short film • 11 minutes • China • 2025
COMING SOON
•
COMING SOON •
SYNOPSIS
In a decaying old courtyard house in northern China, a middle-aged man returns to visit his parents, only to be greeted with disappointment and emotional blackmail. Their obsession with lineage, legacy, and filial performance soon escalates into a grotesque theater of expectations. When verbal pressure fails, the son performs a fake suicide, and later, an even more disturbing act: he pretends to be the infant grandson his parents have always demanded.
Set entirely in the family’s ancestral hall, Barbie unfolds like a ritual—precise, stylized, and unrelentingly absurd. A darkly comedic tale of generational control, repressed rage, and the horrifying elasticity of love.
CAST & CREW
Written & Directed by
Dawan Ma
Cinematography by
Wei Liu
Music by
Pancho Burgos-Goizueta
Starring:
Zhiqiang Zou, Lixia Liu, Fenqiang Wang, Qingzhu Yang
MAGNIFIER PRODUCTION, CH
CO-PRODUCTION AND STRATEGIC SUPPORT BY ORNUMA, FR
DIRECTOR BIO
Dawan Ma (马大湾, 1987, Shenyang) is a Chinese filmmaker, novelist, and screenwriter. He studied mathematics at the Technical University of Berlin before turning to storytelling, seeking a language to explore the quiet violence of ritual and identity, and to trace the contours of a home life that, like many in his country, concealed emotional silence beneath tradition.
His feature Nine Iron was selected by the Tokyo Lift-Off Film Festival (2021), and The Chocolate (part of his 12-part anthology US THEM) was selected by Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival.
Completed in 2025, US THEM (including the shorts Barbie and Live a Hundred Years) is an independent cross-border project with collaborators from China and Spain. Ma shapes precise, inward, and quietly defiant voice, blending poetic minimalism with layered metaphor into narratives that are both deeply local and unmistakably global.