In 2024, I read a news report from China that described over 30,000 unmarried men as a “social problem” in need of resolution. What disturbed me was not the idea of intervention, but the assumption beneath it, that women could be treated as a solution, rather than as individuals with agency and choice. That unease became the starting point for The Tale of a Village.

 

While writing, this impulse evolved into an allegorical setting. In a remote village where fewer girls are born, the Church responds by confining all unmarried girls in a convent, stripping them of control over their future. From within this system, a personal story emerged: a father trying to protect his daughters.

 

Although I was encouraged to place the film in a contemporary setting, I felt the story required distance. By situating it in a feudal-like world, the mechanisms of control become clearer, and harder to ignore.

 

Setting the film in 1920s Ireland allowed the story to resonate with the history of the Magdalene laundries, while reflecting a logic that still appears, in different forms, in the present.