Lin Juan is six and has already been told she was found in a rubbish bin. The woman who took her in loves her, but when she remarries, Juan is handed to Wang Weiqiang and Ding Meishuang, a city couple still grieving the daughter they lost at seven. Now she is Wang Juan. She learns to dance, fights at school and understands, without anyone saying so, whose place she is filling. At sixteen, her birth parents appear, call her by a third name and take her home to a brother and sister she has never met.

Zou Jing’s first feature grew from something she learned only after her grandmother died: that she too had been abandoned as a baby, in 1936. The film follows its heroine from six to eighteen, through a village, a city flat and a factory floor, and never shows us more than she knows. The years jump without warning, just as she is moved without warning. Light carries much of the feeling, from sunlit rivers to rooms kept half dark by grief, and finally a classroom where she studies how light travels. It is a film of few words, patient and tender, about a girl who is always being given away, and who slowly learns to belong to herself.