Hypnotic odd-couple story of a teenager struggling with her mental health and a carer exploring their gender
At times it feels like Canadian director Ashley McKenzie is setting a challenge with this: are you arthouse enough? Have you got the cinematic endurance? Her film is the story of a friendship between a neurodivergent teenager called Star struggling with her mental health, and a hospital volunteer newly immigrated from China. You could imagine it being turned into a quirky-cute odd-couple indie comedy with a superficial take on neurodivergence. Instead, McKenzie pulls us into Star’s reality, how she experiences the world. It’s a disorientating, unrelaxing two-hour experience, but rewarding.
It is set in the middle of winter in Nova Scotia, with snow up to the height of car roofs. Star (brilliantly played by Sarah Walker) has been admitted to hospital after drinking poison – not her first suicide attempt. A doctor...
At times it feels like Canadian director Ashley McKenzie is setting a challenge with this: are you arthouse enough? Have you got the cinematic endurance? Her film is the story of a friendship between a neurodivergent teenager called Star struggling with her mental health, and a hospital volunteer newly immigrated from China. You could imagine it being turned into a quirky-cute odd-couple indie comedy with a superficial take on neurodivergence. Instead, McKenzie pulls us into Star’s reality, how she experiences the world. It’s a disorientating, unrelaxing two-hour experience, but rewarding.
It is set in the middle of winter in Nova Scotia, with snow up to the height of car roofs. Star (brilliantly played by Sarah Walker) has been admitted to hospital after drinking poison – not her first suicide attempt. A doctor...
- 11/14/2023
- by Cath Clarke
- The Guardian - Film News
Canadian director Ashley McKenzie’s two features pivot around people caught up in traps. She’s a regional filmmaker, making work based in the communities of Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton island, which is home to 132,000 people. Her 2016 debut, Werewolf, followed a couple of opioid addicts struggling to live on methadone maintenance. Her long-awaited follow-up Queens of the Qing Dynasty, opening this Friday at NYC’s Metrograph, begins with a suicide attempt by an 18-year-old girl, Star (Sarah Walker). Although she’s just begun life as an adult, she will likely require a lifetime of institutionalization, as the state has determined that it’s too dangerous for her to live on her own. She befriends hospital volunteer An (Ziyin Zheng), a genderqueer college student from Shanghai.
Most of Queens of the Qing Dynasty remains confined to the uninviting spaces of the hospital, but the final half-hour shows the possibilities of...
Most of Queens of the Qing Dynasty remains confined to the uninviting spaces of the hospital, but the final half-hour shows the possibilities of...
- 5/3/2023
- by Steve Erickson
- The Film Stage
One of the films we hoped would get distribution at the start of the year was Ashley McKenzie’s Werewolf follow-up Queens of the Qing Dynasty, a selection at Berlinale, TIFF, and NYFF. Thankfully, Factory 25 has come to the rescue and will debut the queer coming-of-age drama starting on May 5 at NYC’s Metrograph. Ahead of the release the new trailer and poster have arrived.
Here’s the synopsis: “Following a failed suicide attempt, introverted smalltown teenager Star (Sarah Walker) is subjected to constant invasive monitoring that does little to help her—until her encounter with An (Ziyin Zheng), a similarly genderqueer international student from Shanghai who’s been assigned to watch her in hospital, offers an unexpected chance for connection. Their blossoming relationship—two kindred spirits meeting across spectrums of culture, queerness, and neurodiversity—unfolds with alchemic crackle, leading up to a deeply moving denouement.”
Jared Mobarak said in his review,...
Here’s the synopsis: “Following a failed suicide attempt, introverted smalltown teenager Star (Sarah Walker) is subjected to constant invasive monitoring that does little to help her—until her encounter with An (Ziyin Zheng), a similarly genderqueer international student from Shanghai who’s been assigned to watch her in hospital, offers an unexpected chance for connection. Their blossoming relationship—two kindred spirits meeting across spectrums of culture, queerness, and neurodiversity—unfolds with alchemic crackle, leading up to a deeply moving denouement.”
Jared Mobarak said in his review,...
- 4/18/2023
- by Leonard Pearce
- The Film Stage
There are chemicals mixed into the magical focal bond in "Queens of the Qing Dynasty." It's perhaps incomprehensible in normal terms but easier to feel in the visual textures of a film about two misfits.
The sophomore feature of Canadian director Ashley McKenzie (the 2016 "Werewolf"), "Queens of the Qing Dynasty" expresses a fixation on particles: the freckles, the frost, and the fingernail dust. Twenty minutes into the film, we're privy to a medical appointment where a scope is lowered into an esophagus and slithers into slimy innards. An unorthodox rhythm is spun out of the mechanical wriggle of the tube and the dilated pupils of the patient, the wide-eyed Canadian teen Star (Sarah Walker). Such textures, visual and sound, define Star's existence as a neurodivergent teen.
Star speaks in her own terse vernaculars. Her perpetual facial placidness is not to be mistaken for stoicism, vacancy, or aloofness. She holds a...
The sophomore feature of Canadian director Ashley McKenzie (the 2016 "Werewolf"), "Queens of the Qing Dynasty" expresses a fixation on particles: the freckles, the frost, and the fingernail dust. Twenty minutes into the film, we're privy to a medical appointment where a scope is lowered into an esophagus and slithers into slimy innards. An unorthodox rhythm is spun out of the mechanical wriggle of the tube and the dilated pupils of the patient, the wide-eyed Canadian teen Star (Sarah Walker). Such textures, visual and sound, define Star's existence as a neurodivergent teen.
Star speaks in her own terse vernaculars. Her perpetual facial placidness is not to be mistaken for stoicism, vacancy, or aloofness. She holds a...
- 10/18/2022
- by Caroline Cao
- Slash Film
“Thank you for communicating and being like family. I love you for that,” Star (Sarah Walker) tells An (Ziyin Zheng) in the final moments of “Queens of the Qing Dynasty.” The moment feels like a closure point, as if the close friendship between the characters has run its course. But rather than a goodbye, it instead feels like the friendship is being put in a box, carefully placed in the back of a closet. The intensity of this moment for Star and An is over, but they are both forever changed simply by knowing each other. It’s like the parting of two lovers, connected by language instead of sex or even physical touch. Their relationship is personified perfectly on the poster, which displays two hands crossed at the wrist, occupying the same space without contact, close and distant at the same time.
With their first feature “Werewolf,” Canadian director...
With their first feature “Werewolf,” Canadian director...
- 10/15/2022
- by Jourdain Searles
- Indiewire
Queens of the Qing Dynasty, the second feature from Nova Scotia’s Ashley McKenzie, is a unique work of independently produced Canadian cinema. Both a stark about-face from the hardscrabble realism of her 2016 debut Werewolf—about a pair of strung-out young lovers living hand-to-mouth on the margins of Cape Breton—and a decisive break from the docufiction trends of art cinema at large, Queens is rigorously composed and austerely dramatized, an artful fable pitched somewhere between comedy and tragedy. Starring newcomer Sarah Walker as Star, a neurodivergent teen who develops a deep connection with her caregiver An (Ziyin Zheng, also making their […]
The post Crafting a Life as a Filmmaker: Ashley McKenzie on Queens of the Qing Dynasty first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.
The post Crafting a Life as a Filmmaker: Ashley McKenzie on Queens of the Qing Dynasty first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.
- 9/30/2022
- by Jordan Cronk
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Queens of the Qing Dynasty is writer-director Ashley McKenzie’s long-awaited follow-up to Werewolf (2016), her auspicious first feature, and one of the most acclaimed Canadian debuts of recent years. Like Werewolf, Queens is set on McKenzie’s native Cape Breton Island, off the East Coast of Nova Scotia. And like that film, it is essentially a two-hander, following a pair of entwined lives with an at times disconcerting intimacy. When first introduced, 18-year-old Star (Sarah Walker) has been admitted to a hospital for ingesting poison, though we quickly surmise that she has been in and out of hospitals and social welfare institutions for much of her life. Meanwhile, An (Ziyin Zheng), a Chinese expatriate volunteering at a local hospital to accrue immigration points, has been assigned to her case. The strange, symbiotic relationship that soon develops between the two provides the film with its unpredictable, live-wire energy.In its approach to psychology and character subjectivity,...
- 2/27/2022
- MUBI
Our introductions to writer/director Ashley McKenzie’s leads in Queens of the Qing Dynasty are not to be forgotten. Whether Star’s (Sarah Walker) open-mouthed and fully dilated thousand-yard stare in a hospital bed after her latest suicide attempt (this time for drinking poison) or An’s (Ziyin Zheng) voice regaling the women nurses with a Chinese song while their supervisor drawls “Old Macdonald” in response, the notion that we’re dealing with two eccentrics in a world that may never understand them is abundantly clear. It’s therefore only right that they’d end up being put on a collision course ignited by duty (An’s hospital volunteer is assigned Star’s evening suicide watch) yet sustained by genuine intrigue. They share their deepest secrets without judgement, ultimately discovering things about themselves along the way.
It’s through these late-night sessions that they begin to question the roads...
It’s through these late-night sessions that they begin to question the roads...
- 2/24/2022
- by Jared Mobarak
- The Film Stage
Filmmaker Ashley McKenzie (“Werewolf”) returns to the Berlinale this year with her second feature, “Queens of the Qing Dynasty,” premiering in Encounters on Tuesday. The writer-director stands out as an emerging Canadian talent, backed by the Toronto Film Critics Assn., who awarded her debut film the $100,000 Rogers Best Canadian Film Award in 2017.
An impressive new offering, “Queens” showcases McKenzie’s flair for loose, floating narratives and complex characters hoping to break free from their ennui. Protagonist Star (Sarah Walker) navigates life after a suicide attempt with the help of a special kind of babysitter, hospital volunteer An (Ziyin Zheng). An idiosyncratic friendship blooms and Star finally begins to feel a sense of kinship in her life, supported by a vibrantly queer individual who stands apart from the beige monotony of her experiences in the outside world.
Where did this story originate for you?
I auditioned two teenagers for my last feature,...
An impressive new offering, “Queens” showcases McKenzie’s flair for loose, floating narratives and complex characters hoping to break free from their ennui. Protagonist Star (Sarah Walker) navigates life after a suicide attempt with the help of a special kind of babysitter, hospital volunteer An (Ziyin Zheng). An idiosyncratic friendship blooms and Star finally begins to feel a sense of kinship in her life, supported by a vibrantly queer individual who stands apart from the beige monotony of her experiences in the outside world.
Where did this story originate for you?
I auditioned two teenagers for my last feature,...
- 2/15/2022
- by Caitlin Quinlan
- Variety Film + TV
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