China Lion Film Distribution has acquired I Know Who You Are, the latest feature from veteran Chinese director Feng Xiaogang, for the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The specialty label will release it across those markets in early July — days after the film’s mainland debut.
The deal covers all media rights, with exact dates by territory still to be set. I Know Who You Are opened in China on June 19, taking in about $9 million for third place on its first weekend.
Adapted from Zhang Ce’s 1992 novella No Regrets Tracking — earlier the basis for a well-regarded television series — the film is a decades-spanning cat-and-mouse story set in the early years of the People’s Republic. Lei Jiayin plays a grassroots police chief who becomes convinced that a quiet local schoolteacher, played by Hu Ge, is a deep-cover spy, and spends the next four decades trying to prove it — a surveillance operation that slowly evolves into something closer to a personal relationship.
Feng is among the most commercially successful directors China has produced, with credits including Aftershock, Back to 1942, I Am Not Madame Bovary, Youth and Only Cloud Knows; China Lion released Youth in North America in 2017.
Lei recently appeared in Zhang Yimou’s spy thriller Scare Out and in Peng Fei’s Take Off, which plays the New York Asian Film Festival next month. Hu starred in Diao Yinan’s Cannes competition title The Wild Goose Lake, opposite Gwei Lun-mei. He also starred in Wong Kar Wai’s acclaimed Blossoms Shanghai series.
China Lion picked up the film from Damai Entertainment, the studio behind both Scare Out and Dear You. Founded in 2010 and based in Los Angeles, China Lion specializes in releasing Chinese-language films in North American theaters.