EXPORT MY LOVE

After the feature, enjoy a FREE bonus recording of the live Q&A with director Jinglin Li, recorded on 10/28/20. 

“A man can have multiple wives, but a woman cannot marry twice,” wrote Zhao Ban, a prominent Han Dynasty intellectual, in her book Lessons for Women. Centuries later, divorced women in China still face hardships with social acceptance and remarriage. Motivated by the desire for true love and economic security for their children, some women have begun to look for husbands overseas, where the stigma is lower and the chance for a better life seemingly higher. 

EXPORT MY LOVE begins in Boston with Jany Murphy scouting Match.com for American men for her clients: divorced or widowed women in China. Jany is the international love realtor, a modern day Cyrano de Bergerac, strategizing and even composing WeChat texts to incubate romance despite different love languages. For Jany, the work is personal. Four-times married across two countries, and fabulously adept at new media romance, Jany uses her experience with both the light and dark sides of foreign marriage to help three Chinese divorcees find American husbands and ultimately, love. 

With intimacy and realism, director Jinglin Li catalogues the hopes, disappointments, moments of connection, and cultural barriers that each woman faces in her search for partnership. The women are lively and uniquely different, and give voice to a part of Chinese society that is often forced to remain silent for fear of gossip. The result is a film that honors the courage of modern, transcontinental relationship pioneers.

–Yang Jiang