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Women in China

WIDOWED WITCH, THE

By Cai Chengjie

Winner of the top prize at the Rotterdam Film Festival, director Cai Chengjie's debut feature is, like its titular protagonist, defiantly low-fi, unexpectedly powerful and fiercely unpredictable.

Deemed cursed by the local villagers, three-time widow Er Hao (played by Tian Tian) has her hands full with a rogue fireworks explosion, a tagalong teenager, and a veritable army of crazed local men who can't keep their hands off her. Turned away when she seeks shelter from her neighbors and forced to take up residence in a cold camper van, Er Hao's future looks as bleak as the stark, snowy countryside.

But a series of fluke changes in fortune causes Er Hao to embrace the mystical identity her villagers have assigned to her. As a sort of modern shaman, she steers superstitions into small subversions, helping others who once shunned her and proving that to survive as a woman is a kind of magic.

THE WIDOWED WITCH fearlessly addresses the power of religion in China which, according to the dictates of Communism, is effectively banned. It also conveys the cruelty that can come with village life, and counters the Western narrative of China as a superpower by showing a place where the rule of law is all but nonexistent. Not only is there no recourse or safety net, even the rape that Er Hao suffers goes unpunished. Abused and shunned, Er Hao gains power over the men who have wronged her - but can she find a place in a misogynist, patriarchal and deeply lonely social structure?

With a stunning array of visual styles and a genre-exploding approach to storytelling, THE WIDOWED WITCH is a simultaneously idealistic and despairing film - a bleak view wrapped in a fabulist aesthetic, and one that encompasses both magic realism and crushing social satire.

DVD (Mandarin with English subtitles, Color, Black and White) / 2017 / 118 minutes

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MOSUO SISTERS, THE

By Marlo Poras

A tale of two sisters living in the shadow of two Chinas, this documentary by award-winning filmmaker Marlo Poras (Mai's America; Run Grany Run) follows Juma and Latso, young women from one of the world's last remaining matriarchal societies. Thrust into the worldwide economic downturn after losing jobs in Beijing and left with few options, they return to their remote Himalayan village. But growing exposure to modernity has irreparably altered traditions of the Mosuo, their tiny ethnic miniority, and home is not the same. Determined to keep their family out of poverty, one sister sacrifices her educational dreams and stays home to farm, while the other leaves, trying her luck in the city. The changes test them in unexpected ways. This visually stunning film highlights today's realities of women's lives and China's vast cultural and economic divides while offering rare views of a surviving matriarchy.

DVD (Mandarin/Mosuo/Tibetan, Color) / 2013 / 80 minutes

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MOTHERS

By XU Huijing

Mothers is a gripping cinema verite documentary that shows how China's one-child policy plays out in the daily lives of women in a northern Chinese village.

There are not a lot of job prospects in Ma, a community of 2,000 in Shanxi Province. Factories have closed, young people are leaving, and declining numbers are more of a problem than over-population. Still, town officials must strictly enforce the one-child policy. In the case of Ma, this means meeting an annual quota for the sterilization of women who have had more than one child.

At the heart of the documentary lies a high stakes cat-and-mouse game. On one side are the male deputy mayor Zhang Guo-hong and the female local director of women's care, Zhang Qing-mei, On the other: a schoolteacher named Rong Rong who is a mother of two - and who has managed so far to avoid sterilization. Now - faced with the prospect of failing to meet their quota - Qing-mei and Guo-hong are determined to make sure Rong Rong doesn't outwit them again. They appear at her house early in the morning, try to track her down through her relatives (including a grandmother who emphatically berates Guo-hong), and hold out a carrot in the form of the residency papers she will need for her second child.

Meanwhile, Qing-mei also travels through town on her red scooter, spreading the gospel of family planning at rallies and celebrations, and trying to exhort as many women as possible to submit to sterilization.

Without resorting to voice-over, Mothers offers a powerful feminist perspective, as we watch men developing and enforcing reproductive policies for women. Here, women's bodies are not an ideological battleground, but the epicenter of the conflict over the most banal of undertakings: meeting a quota. Eventually, even Guo-hong admits to the camera, "We're just scared of losing our jobs. Do you think I am really committed to this?"

DVD / 2013 / 68 minutes

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EGG AND STONE

By Huang Ji

Huang Ji's brave personal film is one of the most auspicious debuts in recent Chinese cinema. Set in her home village in rural Hunan province, EGG AND STONE is a powerful autobiographical portrait of a 14-year-old girl's attempts to come to terms with her emerging sexual maturity. Since her parents moved to the city to work, she has been forced to live with her uncle and aunt for seven years. Alone with her own inchoate fears and desires, she grapples with a terrifying world of sexual awakening and danger. Huang Ji's visual sophistication, narrative fluency, and technical polish belie her youth. Cinematographer Ryuji Otsuka (also the film's producer and editor) contributes beautifully crafted cinematic images, fearfully intimate, softly pulsing with light, saturated with complex emotional power.

DVD (Color, Hunan with English Subtitles) / 2012 / 98 minutes

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FEMALE DIRECTORS (NU DAOYAN)

By Yang Mingming

Ah-Ming and Yueyue are two out-of-work film school grads living in Beijing who decide to turn the camera on each other and make a film about their lives.

On the surface, FEMALE DIRECTORS is the ultimate documentary for the age of oversharing. Two young women love the camera and record the minutiae of their lives: meals, nasty fights, phone calls. Soon after the camera starts rolling, they discover that both are seeing the same sugar daddy. Recriminations and profane accusations follow. Eventually, the pair, make up, break up with the man they call "short stuff" and go traveling together.

But there is much more to this film. Is it a documentary, mockumentary, or a sly piece of drama? Ah-Ming herself is a fiction-the on-screen persona of Yang Ming Ming, the film's actual director. Deliberately unpolished, FEMALE DIRECTORS highlights rather than obscures the presence of the the camera, as it is dropped on a bed, Ah-Ming and Yueyue jostle over it, or as one or the other implores her counterpart to turn it off.

While it purports to be the true story of two women filming themselves, FEMALE DIRECTORS constantly reminds us of the process that has gone into making it. It is a genre-bending, self-aware piece of experimental filmmaking that bears repeated viewing.

DVD (Color, Chinese with English subtitles) / 2012 / 43 minutes

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THREE SISTERS (SAN ZIMEI)

By Wang Bing

One of his generation's most important documentary filmmakers, director Wang Bing is at the height of his powers in THREE SISTERS. The film introduces viewers to 10-year-old YingYing, 6-year-old Zhenzhen and 4-year-old Fenfen, who live alone in Xiyangtang, a tiny rural village in the high mountains of China's Yunnan province. Their father is away working in the city; their mother left the family long ago.

The girls help their grandfather or aunt in exchange for meals. They spend their days at grueling tasks: herding sheep, goats and pigs, searching for firewood, collecting dung. Games are few and far between. The eldest, Yingying, is her sisters' primary caretaker, shouldering responsibilities far beyond her years.

Wang's hand-held footage beautifully captures the region's dramatic landscapes and plunging, mountainous scenery in THREE SISTERS, an essential part of the international film canon.

DVD (Color, Mandarin and Yunnan dialect with English subtitles) / 2012 / 153 minutes

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WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS (WEI CHAO)

By JI Dan

On the outskirts of Beijing, two teenage girls from a migrant family struggle to earn the money to pay for their brother's schooling with little help from their troubled and eccentric parents.

Growing up in a rickety hut on a garbage-filled lot, Xia, Ling, and Gang recognize that a good education is their only possible ticket to a better life. Their older sister, who left school to begin working, has disappeared, likely kidnapped and sold into prostitution.

As migrants, they are prevented by China's hukou (residence permit) system from attending a free public school, and when the school that had provided them with scholarships closes, they are forced to look for new options. With very little money to their name, they place all their hopes in Gang, the older brother.

Their complicated home life doesn't make things any easier. Their alcoholic father and their mother are frequently at one another's throats, and do not seem to understand the gravity of their children's situation.

Director Ji Dan, one of China's preeminent female filmmakers, first met Xia, Ling, and Gang in 2004, while making a film about education in China, This intimate, patient portrait grew out of their close relationship over many years.

WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS at once explores the particular dynamics of one family and exposes the widespread difficulties faced by migrants living at the margins of Chinese society.

DVD (Color) / 2012 / 144 minutes

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GAI SHANXI AND HER SISTERS (GAI SHAN XI HE TA DE JIE MEI MEN)

Directed by BAN Zhongyi

GAI SHANXI AND HER SISTERS tells the story of one woman's brutal ordeal as a "comfort woman" for the Japanese Army during World War II. Hou Dong-E, known as "Gai Shanxi," the fairest woman in China's Shanxi province, was one of the many women abducted from their villages to be sexually enslaved by Japanese soldiers stationed nearby. Fifty years later, she joined other women throughout Asia to seek justice and reparations, but she died before her demands were answered.

Chinese filmmaker Ban Zhongyi unearths Gai Shanxi's tragic life through the stories of the surviving women in the region. Ban also collects revelatory testimonies from former Japanese soldiers stationed in Shanxi during the war, breaking a decades-long silence over a dark chapter of China's history. Following one woman's heroic journey, GAI SHANXI AND HER SISTERS tells a universal story of female solidarity and survival.

DVD (Color, Mandarin, Japanese, & Shanxi dialect) / 2007 / 80 minutes

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LITTLE MOTH (XUE CHAN)

By PENG Tao

When an impoverished country couple adopts a crippled young girl and puts her to work begging on city streets, a battle soon ensues over her fate.

Luo Jiang and Guihua, a poor, middle-aged couple with few prospects, decide to buy an 11-year-old girl, Xiao Ezi (aka "Little Moth"), for $140 in rural China. Xiao Ezi's life is in peril, as she is forced to earn money for her new parents as a beggar while suffering from a blood disease that leaves her unable to walk. Her greedy adoptive father, Luo Jiang, refuses to buy her medicine, while Guihua's growing maternal affection wracks her with guilt. After a run-in with local extortionists, the three flee into the territory of the unsavory Mr. Yang, whose one-armed boy Xiao Chun is also forced to beg. Inevitably the grownups take turns taking advantage of each other, giving the children a rare opportunity to develop a protective bond with one another.

With virtually no budget, a hand-held digital camera and a cast of non-professionals, Peng Tao turns the sordid street life of small town China into a chain-reaction tale of human cruelty and unforgettable suspense.

DVD (Hubei dialect with English subtitles, Color) / 2007 /

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SUPER, GIRLS! (CHAO JI NU SHENG)

Directed by JIAN Yi

SUPER, GIRLS! follows ten female teenagers on their quest to become instant superstars on China's biggest television show.

The Chinese equivalent of "American Idol," the "Super Girls Singing Contest" spawned an unprecedented pop culture phenomenon. Drawing over 400 million viewers, the show's runaway popularity spurred the Chinese government to ban it after only two seasons.

The film provides unparalleled, intimate access into the contestants' lives over several months. Through candid interviews and footage of nail-biting auditions and competitions, SUPER, GIRLS! offers a fascinating look inside what the Chinese media have dubbed "the Lost Generation" and their startling takes on sexuality and success in the new China.

DVD (Color, Mandarin with English subtitles) / 2007 / 73 minutes

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WOMEN'S KINGDOM, THE

By Xiaoli Zhou

Keepers of one of the last matriarchal societies in the world, Mosuo women in a remote area of southwest China live beyond the strictures of mainstream Chinese culture - enjoying great freedoms and carrying heavy responsibilities.

Beautifully shot and featuring intimate interviews, this short documentary offers a rare glimpse into a society virtually unheard of 10 years ago and now often misrepresented in the media. Mosuo women control their own finances and do not marry or live with partners; they practice what they call "walking marriage." A man may be invited into a woman's hut to spend a "sweet night," but must leave by daybreak. While tourism has brought wealth and 21st century conveniences to this remote area, it has also introduced difficult challenges to the Mosuo culture - from pollution in the lake, to the establishment of brothels, to mainstream ideas about women, beauty and family. This finely wrought film is a sensitive portrayal of extraordinary women struggling to hold on to their extraordinary society.

DVD (Mandarin, Color) / 2006 / 22 minutes

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SEARCHING FOR LIN ZHAO'S SOUL (XUN ZHAO LIN ZHAO DE LING HUN)

Directed by HU Jie

This landmark documentary reveals the tragic life of a gifted young woman who was executed for speaking out during the height of Chairman Mao's rule.

Lin Zhao, a top student from Peking University, was imprisoned for defending students and leaders persecuted during Mao Zedong's Anti-Rightist Movement in the late 1950s. A gifted writer, Lin composed endless articles and poems from her cell. Forbidden to use pens, she wrote with a hairpin dipped in her own blood. In 1968 she was executed, her tragic life lost to the margins of history. Four decades later, filmmaker Hu Jie brings Lin's story to light and uncovers the details of this forgotten woman's fight for civil rights.

Searching for Lin Zhao's Soul stands as a landmark in the Chinese independent documentary movement, an unprecedented work of investigation and recovery of modern China's suppressed memories. Director Hu Jie digs through artifacts and interviews first-hand witnesses to Lin's persecution, illuminating an era of political terror that sent millions to their deaths. The result is a lasting testament to a young woman's legacy of courage and conviction. In the words of Chinese writer Ran Yunfei, "Lin Zhao is the spiritual resource for all Chinese people and the legacy for the whole world."

DVD (Color, Mandarin with English subtitles) / 2004 / 115 minutes

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NU SHU: A HIDDEN LANGUAGE OF WOMEN IN CHINA

By Yue-Qing Yang<

In feudal China, women, usually with bound feet, were denied educational opportunities and condemned to social isolation. But in Jian-yong county in Hunan province, peasant women miraculously developed a separate written language, called Nu Shu, meaning "female writing." Believing women to be inferior, men disregarded this new script, and it remained unknown for centuries. It wasn't until the 1960s that Nu Shu caught the attention of Chinese authorities, who suspected that this peculiar writing was a secret code for international espionage. Today, interest in this secret script continues to grow, as evidenced by the wide critical acclaim of Lisa See's recent novel, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, about Nu Shu.

NU SHU: A HIDDEN LANGUAGE OF WOMEN IN CHINA is a thoroughly engrossing documentary that revolves around the filmmaker's discovery of eighty-six-year-old Huan-yi Yang, the only living resident of the Nu Shu area still able to read and write Nu Shu. Exploring Nu Shu customs and their role in women's lives, the film uncovers a women's subculture born of resistance to male dominance, finds a parallel struggle in the resistance of Yao minorities to Confucian Han Chinese culture, and traces Nu Shu's origins to some distinctly Yao customs that fostered women's creativity.

DVD (Color) / 1999 / 59 minutes

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VISITORS OF THE NIGHT

By An van Dienderen>

The failures of the ethnographic endeavor to discover "reality" are revealed in this expository and experimental film. The narrator-ethnographer embarks on an expedition to encounter the Mosou, an isolated and matrilinear tribe in the mountains of South West China. Their society is built on the principle of the axia-relationship, ties between 'visitors of the night'. This means that a man only stays in his wife's house at night and during the day he works for the benefit of his grandmother. Since men and women do not have economical obligations, their unique, polyandric relationships are based on love only. Recently due to funding by the Han government, The Lugo region has turned into a major touristic area, where tradition and modernity clash -- particularly when the polyandry of the Mosuo is seen as prostitution by outsiders. Van Dienderen, a visual anthropologist, playfully reveals the distance between textual knowledge and the experience of a cinematographic journey in a thoughtful and fascinating documentary.

DVD (Color) / 1998 / 34 minutes

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OUT OF PHOENIX BRIDGE

By Li Hong

This groundbreaking work from Li Hong, China's first independent female documentarian, follows two years in the lives of four young women from the countryside who have come to Beijing for jobs. Although they work long hours as maids or street vendors and share a tiny room no bigger than a closet, they savor these years- between living as a daughter at home and returning to the village to marry -as probably the freest time of their lives. Documenting both her deepening relationship with these women and the gulf of experiences and opportunity that separate them, Hong carefully charts their hopes for a better future and dreams of self-determination.

In interviews and intimate footage, Hong elicits remarkably candid and complex testimony from her subjects as they frankly discuss their work, pressures from home, and experiences with men. A remarkable achievement, this touching film is a fascinating look at the lives of women whose experiences are rarely explored. As they straddle traditional and modern roles, their stories uniquely exemplify the conflicts between the swift changes in women's roles occurring in China and around the developing world.

DVD (Color) / 1997 / 110 minutes

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THROUGH CHINESE WOMEN'S EYES

By Mayfair Yang

"THROUGH CHINESE WOMEN'S EYES offers an insightful journey into the transformations in the lives of Chinese women over the 20th century. In a fascinating overview, anthropologist/director Mayfair Yang documents the attempts to erase gender differences under Mao, today's changing ideas of femininity, and the crystallization of Chinese feminism at the UN Women's conference in Beijing. As propaganda films and news footage of the 1960's, present day television images, and interview footage from the 1990's mingle in a rich visual history, teachers, karaoke singers, organizers, and others share their lives. This sensitive portrayal of the daily experiences and historical memories of Chinese is essential to an understanding of contemporary feminisms." - Faye Ginsburg, New York University

DVD (Color) / 1997 / 52 minutes

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WOMAN BEING

By Wen-Jie Qin

In a critical examination of changing concepts of beauty and sexuality in modern China, Woman Being illustrates how a flood of Western pop culture is adversely affecting women's expectations and self-worth. Revisiting her hometown Chengdu after a long absence, videomaker Wen-Jie Qin traces the impact of a newly booming beauty industry in a country where thirty years ago women were beat up for wearing makeup. Combining interviews and footage from glamour photo studios and television, Woman Being explores the rise of a new super-feminine, highly sexualized ideal. "This hard-nosed look at women in contemporary China makes a persuasive case for how the economies of pleasure, beauty, and consumption are transacted through exploiting women's bodies and images. It provides a sobering prognosis of what Ofreedom' might mean for women in China today." - Marina Heung, Baruch College, CUNY

DVD (Color) / 1997 / 20 minutes

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