Innocent Flesh
无辜的肉
LIN Yihan
23 minutes | 2025 | Fiction | Mandarin, Hokkien | English and Chinese Subtitles
World Premiere
Content Advisory: This film contains scenes of coarse language, violence
7:15 PM, SAT, AUG 9
Innis Town Hall
Screening + Live Zoom Q&A
The pregnant Ran and her girlfriend Wen return to a coastal village in Fujian. Her body changes, attuning itself to the rhythms of the sea, the land, and mythic memory. Then, her ex-husband returns unannounced.
Innocent Flesh marks director LIN Yihan’s third entry in the Fountainhead. We screened her short films Yesterday I Was the Moon in 2022 and Sojourn to Shangri-La last year. Across these three works, Lin continues to push the boundaries of visual storytelling—capturing the psychological states of her characters within physical space with striking precision, and integrating metaphor, mysticism, and abstraction with increasing artistic fluency.
Image is an intuitive, enduring vessel for memory that often lingers in the mind before plot, sparking perception and resonance. Innocent Flesh follows a pregnant woman returning with her female partner to a coastal village in Fujian. Dream and reality entwine in an atmosphere thick with mood and emotion. The film is a quietly textured visual experiment achieved on a modest budget—a testament to the director’s control and craft.
Innocent Flesh is also a proof of concept short to Lin’s feature-in-development of the same name, which was selected for our Debut Narrative Feature Development Lab last year. We wish the director all the best as she prepares for the next stage of production.
– SHEN Wei
Director
LIN Yihan is a filmmaker and artist based in Shanghai. She investigates subtle and inexplicable relationships between individuals in the contemporary context, with a particular focus on subjects that are in an insecure, nomadic, and transient state. Her works have been selected for Berlinale, Locarno Film Festival, Slamdance Film Festival, Grilla 3 Lima Alterna Festival, etc. Innocent Flesh is also her feature project in development, which was selected for the Debut Narrative Feature Development Lab at MulanIFF and won an award at Hong Kong – Asia Film Financing Forum (HAF).
Credits
- Director: LIN Yihan
- Principal Cast: XU Oubu, MIAO Jijun, BAI Du
- Producer: LI Yuwen, Hattie YU, Robert GUO Qiancheng
- Screenplay: LIN Yihan
- Cinematographer: Luc WU Yikai
- Production Designer: MEI Xinyi
- Editor: LIN Yihan
- Sound: Sophia SHEN Siyang