Old Stone

Director: Johnny Ma

2016 / 80min / DCP

An act of Good Samaritanism gone terribly awry sets Ma’s feature debut, a noirish morality play, in motion. After colliding with a motorcyclist thanks to the antics of a drunker passenger, taxi driver Lao Shi takes the wounded man to the hospital—and finds himself saddled with medical bills that threaten his very livelihood, sending him on a trajectory of moral degeneration and mounting desperation. A damning, daring indictment of bureaucratic brutality and antisocial public policy in modern China, with Wang Hongwei as an old friend of our protagonist who refuses to lend his flailing pal any lifesaving cash.

A Zeitgeist Films Release