EXCLUSIVE: The men of the new documentary The Dating Game are looking for love in modern China, but the odds aren’t exactly stacked in their favor.
In a society that favors male babies over female, there are about 30 million more men than women around, “a huge overall sex imbalance,” according to the Pew Research Center. It also means that men of marrying age – guys like Zhou, Li, and Wu — who hope to find a wife face much more robust competition. In the film directed by Violet Du Feng, the men enlist the aid of a dating coach – Hao – and attend a weeklong dating camp to enhance their facility in the arts of seduction, or at least basic conversation skills with the opposite sex.
The Dating Game, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, opens in theaters in the UK on September 19 and in the U.S. on October 10. We have your first look at the film in the exclusive trailer above. The August 8 (8/8/2025) debut date for the trailer is no accident: 8 is considered the luckiest number in Chinese culture, because the word for it — Ba — sounds similar to Fa, the word that means to make fortune.
Director Violet Du Feng attends ‘The Dating Game’ premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
Cindy Ord/Getty Images
“The majority of the 30 million-surplus of men, most of them at the highest [risk of failing to find a wife] are those who are working class and from the rural area of small towns and Hao is one of them,” Feng told us in an interview at Sundance. “He understands deeply where these men come from. And I think despite the techniques that he’s trying to teach these men that kind of alter them in a way that I don’t necessarily agree with, fundamentally his interest, his motivation to help these men is quite genuine. And that contradiction and that controversy is what actually I think is really interesting.”
Hao tutors his “students” in how to project an attractive image both online and in person; he suggests “opening lines” for them to meet women in public settings and arranges a photo shoot for them with dogs so they can post those pix on social media – on the theory that “women like men who like dogs.”
‘The Dating Game’
Fish+Bear Pictures/Violet Films,
Hao’s charges do their best to follow his counsel, yet express skepticism at times. In the trailer, one of them says, “I don’t like to pretend. I am who I am.”
The film contains many poignant and humorous moments, and a number of awkward ones as the men flub most attempts to appeal to potentially interested parties. The Dating Game has played to sold out screenings at festivals around the world including Sundance, Hot Docs in Toronto, CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, San Francisco, Sheffield DocFest in the UK, and True/False in Columbia, MO. In Missouri, Feng’s documentary attracted a full audience at a 1,200-seat venue.
“I’ve had people afterwards telling me that their jaw hurts from laughing too hard,” Feng told us in Columbia. “And this morning I’ve been stopped by people on the street, at diners, in the coffee shop, elevators, everywhere, telling me that they love the film. And it just meant so much to me.”
Feng won Best International Director for The Dating Game at the Doc Edge festival in New Zealand, and her film won a Special Mention there for Best International Feature. The documentary has been nominated for top awards at Sundance, the San Francisco International Film Festival, Miami Film Festival and more.
The Dating Game is a production of Fish+Bear Pictures and Violet Films, in association with Bird Street Productions, Ten Thousand Images, and Chicken & Egg Pictures. It is produced by Oscar winner Joanna Natasegara (The White Helmets, The Edge of Democracy) and James Costa (Hidden Letters, Welcome to Chechnya).
Watch The Dating Game trailer above.
