SHE'S GOT NO NAME © 2024 We Pictures Limited. All Rights Reserved.
She’s Got No Name, the story of a woman on trial by Peter Ho-Sun Chan
Inspired by a true story, She’s Got No Name is based on one of China’s most famous unsolved murder cases. Peter Ho-Sun Chan, the Hong Kong-born director of Comrades: Almost a Love Story and Dragon (Wu Xia), which was presented in the Out of Competition section in 2011, has directed a period piece set in Japanese-occupied 1940s China.
The film’s original title—which literally means “She has no name”—harks back to a time when working-class women were anonymous. Zhan-Zhou’s name is a combination of that of her former master and her husband, Zhan (“Big Bear”). Found with her husband’s dismembered body, at first she confesses to the murder—a killing seemingly impossible for her to have committed alone—before recanting. Faced with a high-profile trial and the possibility of the death sentence, she discovers an unexpected will to live on. Caught in a difficult situation in which her own life is at stake, she has just two choices: be beaten to death or kill her husband and dismember him to ensure she never sees him again in the next life.
“Maybe it was resilience, a recurring theme in my films, portrayed by a femme fatale this time around, that inspired me to go on this adventure.”
– Peter Ho-Sun Chan
The main character is played by the great Zhang Ziyi (Memoirs of a Geisha, The Grandmaster), a member of the Feature Film Jury in 2006 and the Un Certain Regard Jury in 2013. She also took part in a Rendez-vous with… in Cannes in 2019. In She’s Got No Name, her character is thrust into the court of public opinion, to the point where her destiny is intertwined with that of her country. From Japanese-occupied Shanghai to Nationalist China, through to the birth of the People’s Republic of China, this courtroom drama explores the origins of evil, as well as a decisive historical and political climate.
