Before she made “Birds of Prey,” Cathy Yan impressed audiences at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival with her bold social satire “Dead Pigs,” but despite positive reviews, the film never got distributed for American audiences, until now.
The film, which won the Sundance World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Ensemble Acting, is finally getting released on Friday, February 12 via MUBI, and they just released a brand new trailer for the film.
“It feels a little bit like going back to my roots and going home,” Yan told EW during an interview about the release of the film three years after its festival premiere. “I am deeply proud of the film. It feels good to finally get it out there, and hopefully, it doesn’t feet dated at all. I don’t think it does… If anything, the last crazy four years that we’ve had since I actually made the movie [have made] me see the whole movie in a different light, too.”
“Dead Pigs” was inspired by a true story where thousands of dead pigs were suddenly found floating down a river near Shanghai in 2013. This tragic event inspired Yan to make a humorous satire that explores the tensions between people from different backgrounds and how their stories interlock. According to Yan, her concept started “with China just being such an exaggerated, overt version of that. In my lifetime, it’s changed so much. All of those tensions were highlighted, and sort of in high relief.”
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“Maybe we kind of look the other way or weren’t as aware of the repercussions of rampant capitalism quite in the same way that it’s just so overt China, but it doesn’t mean that it hasn’t happened here, or it doesn’t mean that it hasn’t happened anywhere,” Yan added.
“Dead Pigs” hits MUBI on February 12. Watch the trailer below.