The Wolf (Gu Wancheng and Prasad Shetty, 2026) opens with a sequence of heady romance between 60-year-old Yuan (nick-named “Wolf”) and her 30-year-old girlfriend Zhen Zhen. A former village mayor in Shanghai, Yuan has reinvented herself as the owner of a tax consulting company. The camera follows them observational style – not as a ‘direct cinema’ fly-on-the-wall, but as a friendly and gentle provocateur. Zhen Zhen shows off the tattoo on her arm, reading: “Yuan, I am because of you.” Responding to the incredulity that their age difference inevitably evokes, Zhen Zhen explains what she feels about the relationship. “I am happy when she is with me. Happy when she cooks for me. Happy when we eat together. Happy when she shows me off to others,” she says, laughingly confessing that Yuan has never heard her say this before. In the very next sequence, in Winter of 2023, the protagonists are placed in a very different setting. It is the wedding of Yuan and her husband Zhang’s daughter. Zhen Zhen is helping with the red carpet, recording the events on her mobile phone while speaking to the filmmakers on the side. She confides she was meeting with Zhang for the first time and is nervous. They are dressed formally for the wedding and Yuan’s skirt suit elicits some good-natured teasing from her friends. She admits that her clothes are “femme, a little too femme.” As the daughter leaves with her newly married husband, the emotionally restrained Yuan cannot seem to stop crying. Later, she confesses that had things been different, she would not have chosen to marry but would have considered having a child. Photo: Instagram/@kabirkhankkAfterwards, Yuan spends more time at her office, working and building a separate life with Zhen Zhen. When they are not working, they spend time with Yuan’s friends, some of whom have known her for years. They joke about Yuan crushing over them in the past and rib her about dating “Nan Nan” (Baby girl). One of them entertains everyone by recounting how Yuan came out to her. She had discovered that Yuan spent a night with a woman she did not know. Yuan messaged the friend saying she had something to confide but was afraid of being reprimanded. When the friend responded by acknowledging her “biological need,” Yuan was relieved. “You really understand me, sister” she wrote back. As the friends socialise over meals, rounds of mahjong or the occasional shopping trip, Yuan keeps stepping aside to take work calls. The recurring exchanges – of which we hear only snatches – alert us to the growing precarity of an uncertain economy. There is a sense of foreboding when we hear Yuan say, “If the economy is bad, nothing works.” This economic downturn affects not just Yuan’s business, but also her relationship with Zhen Zhen, who when confronted with financial troubles and pressure from her conservative family, returns to Shanxi to have a baby. Her mother persuades her to have a child as security for the future. Earlier during Yuan’s daughter’s wedding, it had been revealed that Zhen Zhen used to be married. Other revelations follow when she leaves for Shanxi: when Zhen Zhen was living with Yuan in Shanghai, she was already in a ‘fake marriage’ with a man who, after a series of failed relationships, needed a woman to pose as his girlfriend at family gatherings. In turn, Zhen Zhen would have a child with him, but only through In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF). Throughout the film, family emerges as a formidable force determining the trajectory of people’s lives. For Yuan, there had never been an option to not marry, so she had chosen a “tender man” instead of a “masculine man”. Her life changed when, at the turn of the new millennium, she began discovering other worlds on the internet. Scholars Thomas Waugh and Brendan Arroyo, in their book I Confess!, argue that new energies triggered by the proliferation of the internet resulted in the ‘Third Sexual Revolution.’ Similarly, it is through the internet that Yuan discovers other women like herself and meets her first girlfriend. While in the new relationship, Yuan experiences a transformative shift within herself. Later in the film, she admits, “I started living my life at the age of 40. Before that, I was living in vain.” A few years after Yuan started dating women, Zhang had asked her why she left the town every two weeks. Yuan ends up telling him everything. Zhang is surprised his wife’s lover is a woman, but for that very reason decides to not take it seriously. He accepts Yuan’s relationship and never considers divorce. When Yuan offers to separate, he says, “It would be impossible to find another person like you.” The filmmaker asks whether Zhang would have been as accepting if her lover had been male. “No man would accept that,” replies Yuan. Notwithstanding, she feels that she did well in her marriage – she brought up a daughter, made their families happy and retained a band of good friends. She says her life is almost perfect. Zhen Zhen also wishes to find a husband like Zhang. The economic slowdown compels Yuan to wind down her business. To offset her losses, she sets up a Mahjong parlour, a traditional Chinese strategy game and popular mode of social interaction. Zhen Zhen, meanwhile, becomes pregnant but develops complications leading to a miscarriage. When Yuan visits her in Shanxi, the devastation wreaked by her personal predicament and financial stress are written on her body. The once vivacious and high-spirited Zhen Zhen has become dull and enervated. She has also developed skepticism about deviating from the Yin and Yang philosophy, in which she includes IVF and homosexuality. When Yuan is unable to persuade Zhen Zhen to return with her to Shanghai, she accepts it philosophically. If fate wills it, they will be together, otherwise not. The scene fades to black and end-credits roll. However, the film is not over. Yuan is back at the karaoke bar, singing, “Once you love yourself; you will have no competition.” There is also a surprise awaiting the audience, which this review will not disclose. The Wolf challenges many assumptions about life, heteronormativity, queerness and institutions like marriage and family. Lives are not always what they seem, just as there are lives that cannot be ‘seen.’ In countries like India and China, homosexuality is no longer illegal, but social legitimacy is another story altogether. Over the last three decades, cultural practices in India have given queerness a heightened social visibility, making it increasingly acceptable to many across generations, even though the battle for equality is yet to begin. This film tells us that personal freedom cannot wait for all battles to be won. Life must be lived in the present, with all the pain and pleasure it brings. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Kiran Rao (@raodyness)A significant formalist achievement of this observational documentary, shot entirely on iPhone, is its ability to avoid the predictable pitfalls of both direct cinema and cinema verité. Like the early practitioners of direct cinema, the filmmakers do not efface themselves to create a (false) notion of capturing unmediated ‘reality.’ The protagonists smile and wink at the camera, while laughing with the filmmakers. Neither does the camera become cinema verité’s “psychoanalytic stimulant,” which provokes confessions from those who are on the verge of it. Instead, the camera becomes a friend, a confidante and a non-intrusive witness. The protagonists are well-aware that it is a part of the journey and allow it to observe them even when their minds and thoughts drift elsewhere. Some of observational cinema’s ambivalent triumphs have often been at the expense of its characters’ vulnerability. The Wolf takes a different path. Even though the film is structured around a series of incremental revelations, they arrive as insights and never as dramatic disclosures. The reassuring calm with which the film navigates the complex lives of its protagonists intensifies the idea that this too is ‘normal.’ The Wolf is a valuable contribution to the corpus of work that scholar Zoran Lee Pecic calls the ‘New Sinophone Queer cinema.’ Emerging as an interrogation of the perception of national cinemas and the presumed ‘Chineseness’ of Chinese cinema, the Sinophone challenges the assumption that all Chinese-language cultural production should be understood through the lens of the nation-state China. Sinophone cinema transcends the borders of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) to include cinemas from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and all other countries where Chinese diaspora resides. For this reason, the New Queer Sinophone cinema is also global as its circulation and distribution are facilitated by markets and networks outside of China. These films explore how queerness – both local and translational — navigates culturally specific contexts, posing a robust counter to Eurocentric notions of queerness as well as homogenised ideas of cultural distinctiveness.Kabir Khan, Photo: Instagram.Directed and shot by China-based filmmakers Wancheng and Prasad, The Wolf has been produced by Kabir Khan who is known for directing Bollywood blockbusters like New York (2009), Ek Tha Tiger (2012), Bajrangi Bhaijan (2015), 83 (2021) and Chandu Champion (2024). What is perhaps lesser known is his extensive experience in directing and shooting documentary films. After his graduation in the early 1990s, Kabir worked as a cinematographer with veteran journalist Saeed Naqvi on World Report, a pioneering international affairs television program. With Naqvi, Kabir travelled to more than 50 countries, many of which were part of the silk route. His feature documentary The Forgotten Army (1999) and his debut feature film Kabul Express (2006) were directly inspired by these travels. With The Wolf, Kabir has returned to documentary-making, as has Kiran Rao, who is the film’s executive producer and shares his longstanding interest. Rao’s other films like Dhobi Ghat (2010) and Lapata Ladies (2023) engage with the ‘unseen’ lives of people. At a time when geopolitics has made physical mobility across borders increasingly difficult, The Wolf reminds us that artistic imagination and cultural practice do not merely belong to their places of origin, but also to the wider world to which we all belong.Shohini Ghosh is Sajjad Zaheer Professor at the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. This article has been updated and republished at 1.16 pm IST on June 13, 2026.