🎥 Hani (2024) UK Premiere & Conversation with Director Hou Dasheng

HANI is a powerful social drama rooted in the lived reality of the Indigenous Hani (Akha) people, revealing how invisible structures of power shape everyday life.

In a remote mountain village on the China–Myanmar border, a fourteen-year-old boy struggles to raise an impossible bride price in order to marry the girl he loves. What begins as an intimate story of young love gradually exposes a broader mechanism of structural violence. State policies, economic pressure, and imposed social order penetrate the community, turning intimacy into transaction and care into debt. Rejecting ethnographic distance and cultural exoticism, HANI observes contemporary Indigenous life from within, tracing how hatred, faceless and normalized, slowly takes form and leads to irreversible tragedy.

Hou Dasheng is an independent Chinese filmmaker and screenwriter with a background in Ethnic Policy Management and a graduate of the Li Xianting Film School. His debut feature HANI premiered internationally and was selected for major…