I Am What I Am

In southern China's Guangdong Province, among cramped village streets, noisy markets, New Year lanterns and the thunder of festival drums, lives A-Juan, a quiet, awkward teenager whom everyone around him has come to regard as a weakling. His parents left long ago to work in Guangzhou, and the boy grows up with his grandfather, as if abandoned on the roadside of a big world where adults are busy surviving and children learn the price of poverty and mockery far too early. One day during a festival A-Juan falls victim to bullies, but out of the crowd appears a red lion: swift, daring, almost like something out of a fairy tale. Beneath the mask is a girl with the same name, a former lion dancer. She not only restores the boy's lost dignity but also leaves him a lion head, as if passing on a sign: even someone everyone is used to pushing around can one day rise up and make the whole street fall silent.