The Highway (2026)
A successful businesswoman in Chongqing encounters a highway hit-and-run victim discarded like roadkill. Haunted, she returns, confronting the moral line between action and inaction.
SHORT FILM BY YUNG CHANG
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While driving to a business dinner on the outskirts of Chongqing, Boss Li passes the body of an elderly shepherd killed in a highway hit-and-run. Pressed for time, she continues on her journey—but the encounter refuses to leave her.
Unable to move on, she returns to the scene. What begins as an attempt to make sense of one stranger's death gradually becomes a disorienting journey where memory, guilt, and reality begin to dissolve into one another.
Set against the rapidly changing landscape of contemporary China, The Highway is a psychological drama that explores the moral ambiguities of progress and asks what responsibility we bear when another person's suffering becomes little more than an interruption to our own lives.
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Toronto International Film Festival
Atlantic International Film Festival
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2026 / 15 mins / Canada & China
Mandarin, Chongqing & English with English subtitles
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Director: Yung Chang
Producers: Yimin (Fanfan) Zhuang, Dan Montgomery, Yung Chang
Editor: Feng Xi
Cinematographer: Christopher Lew
Composer: Alex Zhang Hungtai
Sound Designer: J.R. Fountain
Re-Recording Mixer & Sound Supervisor: Matthew Chan
Cast: Lu Huang, Ryan Chen, Tao Wang, Heping Gong, Ke Chen, Xia Zhou, Xiaoyun Fang, Yiming Peng, Jiayu Zhang
Art Director: Shing Pooi Goh
Casting Director: Qin Dai
Costume Designer: Siyu Cheng
Colorist: David Tomiak
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Yung Chang (Writer, Director, Producer)
Yung Chang is a Chinese-Canadian filmmaker whose work explores the human consequences of social, political, and economic transformation through intimate, character-driven storytelling. His films include Up the Yangtze, China Heavyweight, The Fruit Hunters, This is Not a Movie, and the Emmy Award nominated Wuhan Wuhan. The Highway marks his fiction debut and an important step toward his first narrative feature, Eggplant.
Lu Huang (Cast: Boss Li)
From her breakout performance as Bai Xuemei in Blind Mountain, to Xiao Man in Blind Massage, and the grieving mother in The Crossing (San Fu Tian), Lu Huang has built a career playing complex, deeply human women. Widely regarded as one of China's leading arthouse actors, she is the only actress of her generation whose starring films have been selected for all three major European film festivals—Cannes, Berlin, and Venice. Western audiences may recognize her from her performance as Bebe Chow in the Hulu series Little Fires Everywhere, opposite Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. Her distinctive screen presence and nuanced performances have earned her international acclaim, making her one of the most sought-after Chinese actors working with leading filmmakers around the world. In The Highway, her restrained performance anchors the film's quiet psychological journey.
