A still from “The Dating Game” by Violet Du Feng, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute. (Photo by Wei Gao)
By Shelby Shaw
We live in an age of bizarre paradoxes. For example, we have a current global population of some eight billion people, and yet many are navigating a plethora of online dating apps to help them find someone to go out with. Singledom persists, matching remains a mysterious phenomenon, and people continue to try new modes of meeting potential partners. Love has still not been reduced to a formula, and Artificial Intelligence will never be able to successfully pair humans for life. But we have yet to give up on unpuzzling romance.
In Violet Du Feng’s documentary The Dating Game, premiering in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, we’re introduced to a new approach to the old matchmaking system. Shot in China where there are some 30 million more men than women in the population, in no small part due to the long-running one-child policy that ended only nine years ago, The Dating Game focuses on a Chongqing-based dating coach named Hao and the single men he’s helping to find a date who hopefully will turn into a girlfriend who will stick around to become a wife. The bachelors, Li (24), Wu (27), and Zhou (36), have little to no experience with relationships with women, coming from rural backgrounds alien to the big city life of their Chongqing dating boot camp. It can be frustrating to have fruitless efforts after a single date that can cost upward of $300 and yet only be making only $600 for the whole month.
While Hao takes each of the men to get fashionable hairstyles and trendy new clothes, he walks them through setting up online dating profiles and guides them through starting and holding conversations in order to get the ultimate goal: an agreed-upon date. But to do so, Hao’s methods involve some deception, to the discomfort of his students. As Wu says, “I don’t like to pretend. I am who I am.” But Hao insists that single Chinese women are looking for specific checklist items amid the massive sea of eligible bachelors they can choose from. “It’s all performance art,” Hao says.
After the film’s premiere on January 23, Hao, Wu, and Zhou join the crowd via Zoom due to visa issues. “Thank you, Sundance, for inviting our film, The Dating Game. When director Feng came to us, we never imagined anyone would be interested in our stories, let alone that Americans would buy tickets to learn about our lives.” The audience, presumably mostly American, laughs out loud. “For the first time, we feel seen.” Since his two clients on the call are still single, Hao adds, “If anyone is interested in Chinese men, I have unlimited resources.”
At the same time that The Dating Game focuses on men, we also meet Hao’s wife, Wen, who is a dating coach for women. But her take is very different from her partner’s, and she doesn’t shy away from standing her ground on her beliefs of what women actually want – including, she insists, nerds. Hao, whose view is that men should be the epitome of culturally relevant and “cool,” disagrees with her. Their businesses stay separate, even if their clientele are mixing in the same dating pools. “[The movie] is not to promote Hao,” Feng says during the Q&A, to audience laughter. “But it’s to actually ask controversial questions.”
Feng invites her filmmaking colleagues to join her onstage, saying, “It’s a moment that we have to celebrate together.” To unrelenting applause, 13 team members one by one come to stand next to her, followed lastly by Feng’s young daughter, who played some piano for the film. “We’re all affected by living lonely in the digital world,” Feng says of how society and technology are increasingly at odds with each other, an aspect of modern life that we are universally more and more familiar with. “I wanted to make sure that this is a film made not laughing at [the bachelors], but laughing with them.”
