‘The Dating Game,’ About Match-Seeking In China, Screens At True/False

The new documentary The Dating Game is lining up dates at film festivals around the world. Director Violet Du Feng’s film — about men in China struggling ardently to find spouses — heads to the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece for its international premiere this Saturday.

From there it’s on to the Human International Documentary Film Festival in Oslo, Norway. “After that we’re going to CPH:DOX [in Copenhagen],” followed by several U.S. festivals, the filmmaker tells Deadline. “Some of these festivals haven’t been announced yet, but it’s going to be a tour, busy time.”

It may be hard to top her experience at True/False in Columbia, MO, where The Dating Game screened several times, including on the documentary festival’s opening night on Thursday.

“There were more than 300 seats,” Feng said. “I’m like, ‘That’s big responsibility.’ So, I was really nervous.” But she needn’t have been.

“Every screening, people were just laughing from the beginning to the end, but the level of their laughter is feeling that they can’t control it,” she said. “It was so beautiful.”

The humor emerges from observing the protagonists, Zhou, Li, and Wu – “three bachelors embarking on a seven-day dating camp” — as they are taught how to market themselves more successfully to women “by Hao, one of China’s most sought-after dating coaches.”

Like Zhou, Li, and Wu, coach Hao comes from a poorer background, an economic status that can negatively impact a man’s odds of attracting a mate in contemporary China where men greatly outnumber women. Hao overcame the limitations of his background to find a partner – although his wife remains deeply skeptical of the dating tips Hao purveys to his clients. The husband-wife interactions resonated with True/False audiences, Feng observes.

“I was really surprised to see that in the film when the wife was talking to Hao about how his techniques don’t work for her, and she felt like he’s poisoned by these techniques, people were clapping. People were clapping, and they’re clapping multiple times for her!” Feng says. “I’ve had people afterwards telling me that their jaw hurts from laughing too hard… And this morning I’ve been stopped by people on the street, at diners, in the coffee shop, elevators, everywhere, telling me that they love the film. And it just meant so much to me.”

She adds, “I’ve been making films about China for so many years, but a Chinese film [screening] in the Midwest had this kind of response — this is such a surprise to me, but a beautiful surprise.”

At the Sundance Film Festival in January, where The Dating Game premiered in World Cinema Documentary Competition, we spoke with Feng for Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast.

“The majority of the 30 million-surplus of men, most of them at the highest [risk of failing to find a wife] are those who are working class and from the rural area of small towns and Hao is one of them,” the director told us. “He understands deeply where these men come from. And I think despite the techniques that he’s trying to teach these men that kind of alter them in a way that I don’t necessarily agree with, fundamentally his interest, his motivation to help these men is quite genuine. And that contradiction and that controversy is what actually I think is really interesting.”

Feng observed during our Sundance interview, “Throughout the course of the production, I was wrestling every day, do I like this guy? Do I care for him? But do I agree with him? And this contradiction in me and the controversy behind it, I hope that the film will provide sort of a journey on its own to invite audiences to also wrestle with themselves and hopefully at the end of the day they can have a good time with the film. But also, it allows us to have a chance to ask these questions about how much we all have to sacrifice… of who we truly are in order to connect with each other in the digital world today.”

China has undergone tremendous demographic shifts in recent years, and not just because of the government-mandated “one child” policy (which was not abandoned until 2015). Megalopolises flooded with people from rural areas seeking work; those workers who were parents typically left their child behind in the care of grandparents, meaning many boys (China’s one child policy resulted in many families choosing to have a boy instead of a girl) grew up with certain deficits.

“There were lack of educational opportunities, there were lack of parenting, there were lack of role models of what relationships looked like, and also the lack of interaction with women,” Feng notes. “I wanted… people to understand it is really not their fault.”

To help the men in the film succeed, Hao goes shopping with them to make sure they’re looking sharp. He urges them to go up to women in public areas and request their phone numbers (a plan that produces little success but much awkwardness), and he takes them to a husky dog park so his clients can populate their social media feeds with photos of themselves lounging with canines, on the theory that women like men who like dogs.

“To me, this is the moment that I really see them genuinely connecting with these dogs and these animals in the most moving way,” the director says. “I actually cried. I felt like probably these dogs are the only ones they can hold onto, even to have a physical hug with.”

The Dating Game is a production of Fish+Bear Pictures and Violet Films, in association with Bird Street Productions, Ten Thousand Images, and Chicken & Egg Pictures. It is produced by Oscar winner Joanna Natasegara (The White Helmets, The Edge of Democracy) and James Costa (Hidden Letters, Welcome to Chechnya). Feng and team are in talks about distribution.

“I’m still in a space trying to build momentum of the film. But I think that we have interest,” Feng comments. “I think the audience response here is a reminder of what we made this film for and what the potential of this film can be for audiences — all ages, all different backgrounds. So, I’m excited about that.”