Directed by Yonfan • 2019 • Hong Kong
Starring Sylvia Chang, Zhao Wei, Alex Tak-Shun Lam

The first animated film by celebrated director Yonfan is an exquisite, sumptuously stylized ode to young love, cinema, and the world of 1960s Hong Kong that has earned comparisons to the lush, languorous romanticism of Wong Kar Wai. Set amid the turbulent social unrest of Hong Kong’s 1967 anticolonialist riots, NO. 7 CHERRY LANE unfolds as an almost hypnotic daydream of bittersweet nostalgia and heady eroticism in which a taboo love triangle plays out between a Proust-reading university student, a self-exiled Taiwanese divorcée, and her ravishingly beautiful daughter. Stunningly realized through a mix of colored-pencil and charcoal drawings on rice paper and studded with references to literature and international art cinema—in particular the films of French screen siren Simone Signoret—this singular achievement in adult animation casts an intoxicating spell all its own.