Looking for Lucky

The film starts off as a rousing dog-and-man comedy set in Shenyang, northeastern China, where people argue continuously. A graduate student loses his professor's dog, Lucky. Worried this will jeopardize his prospective tutorship to secure a good job, he enlists his lousy father in the search. Jiang Jiachen's debut feature is a blast of fresh air with its mature creative choices - composed of just sixty-one shots - and biting satire of his country's emergent culture of opportunism and other modern societal ills. A surprisingly endearing father-and-son tale, it is also one of the festival's most unexpected discoveries.