Too Few to Mention
Lao Yang survives in a garage wedged between concrete and exhaust, sleeping next to strangers’ cars and rising to apply himself to mute labour on construction sites. Years in Australia have left him present but uncounted: an undocumented man without room, name or rights. Every aching hour has been spent for his daughter, Li Zi, whose full scholarship and imminent graduation promise the future he could never claim. With her success secured and the seasons no longer bargaining with him, he chooses a final, orderly disappearance: to hand himself in and leave as quietly as he arrived, a ghost stepping back through the wall.
Li Zi carries a mirrored burden: she loves and resents her father in equal measure, calling his vigilance control, disguising grief as irritation. On their last night together, she picks a fight, hoping anger might slip the bolt of sorrow. She understands what her father will not say: that if he leaves, he will not return. In that unkind garage, he gathers his life into a cloth pouch of cash and sets it in her hands. It is not generosity; it is everything. But a question lingers: was it worth it?
Director bio:
Jeff Zechen Hu is a writer, screenwriter and director currently studying a Master of Film and Television (Filmmaking) at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Since 2014, his literary work has amassed 90 million reads and appeared across China’s leading magazines; six stories have been translated into multiple languages. He was named a Top Ten Chinese Writer of the Year by the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles in 2018 (ranking third after Nobel laureate Mo Yan), won the Huacheng Literary Prize Gold Award and was nominated for the Yu Dafu Literary Award. As a filmmaker, he was one of the script writers for Love Never Ends, which received nominations at the Golden Rooster Awards, while his project Wildflowers was selected from 1500+ entries for the FIRST International Film Festival Project Market in 2022 and later chosen from 2000+ for the Golden Rooster Film Festival. In 2025, Limited Confession won Best Original Screenplay Project and Most Promising New Talent at the Beijing International Film Festival.
Master of Film and Television (Filmmaking)