Alex Jiang

Project

OUT OF THE GARDEN is a folk-horror film about the moment a paradise reveals itself as a cage - and what it costs a girl to walk out anyway.

Set in a remote Hakka village encircled by banyan forest, the film follows fifteen-year-old Yu as she approaches Chū Huā Yuán (Coming Out of the Garden) the blood ritual that will mark her readiness for marriage and her place in the community she has always longed to belong to. When her best friend Faye disappears the morning after confessing she plans to refuse, Yu begins to pull at the seam holding the village's world together. What she unravels reveals a truth the village has always kept: girls who refuse do not escape. They are transformed into the black capons slaughtered to sanctify each new bride, their sacrifice reframed as blessing, their bodies absorbed back into the ritual they tried to leave. When Yu bleeds at last, she chooses a different path, one that costs her everything the village promised her, and returns what was never the village's to keep.

The horror in this film is not the supernatural. It is the ordinary architecture of control: a mother who loves her daughter and still holds her down, a community that genuinely believes it is protecting the girls it sacrifices, a ritual that has survived because no one who survived it was allowed to speak.

It is a film about bodily autonomy and inherited shame, about the specific silence that passes between women across generations, and about the terrifying intimacy of a mother and daughter locked together in a system neither of them made. It is also, finally, a film about transformation as refusal - the possibility that a girl might take the thing designed to erase her and use it to write herself free.