Women Filmmakers in Sinophone World Cinema portrays a group of important contemporary women filmmakers working across the Sinophone world including Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, and beyond. The book delineates and conceptualizes their cinematic and trans-media practices within an evolving, multifaceted feminist intimate-public commons. The films by these experienced and emerging filmmakers, including Huang Yu-shan, Yau Ching, Ai Xiaoming, Wen Hui, Huang Ji and others, represent some of the most innovative and socially engaged work in both fictional and non-fictional modes in Chinese-language cinema as well as global women’s cinema. Their narrative, documentary, and experimental film practices from the 1980s to the present, along with their work in sister media such as dance, theater, literature, and contemporary art, their activities as scholars, educators, activists, and film festival organizers or jurors, have significantly reshaped the landscape of Sinophone film culture and expanded the borders of world cinema.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Projecting Sinophone Cine-Feminisms
- Towards an Intimate-Public Commons
- 1 Migrating Hearts
- Sinophone Geographies of Sylvia Chang’s “Woman’s Film”
- 2 Floating Light and Shadows
- Huang Yu-shan’s Chronicles of Modern Taiwan
- 3 From Sidewalk Realism to Spectral Romance
- Yang Lina’s Post-Socialist Beijing and Beyond
- 4 Eggs, Stones, and Stretch Marks
- Haptic Visuality and Tactile Resistance in Huang Ji’s Personal Cinema
- 5 “Spicy-Painful” Theater of History
- Wen Hui’s Documentary Dance with Third Grandmother
- 6 In Praise of Trans-Asian Sisterhood
- Labor, Love, and Homecoming in Jasmine Ching-hui Lee’s Money and Honey
- 7. “We Are Alive”
- Minor Transnationalism and Yau Ching’s Experimental Filmmaking
- 8 Outcries and Whispers
- Digital Political Mimesis and Radical Feminist Documentary
- Epilogue
- Chinese Glossary
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index
- List of figures
- Fig. Intro. 1 Reunion at Beijing Independent Film Festival, August 2012 (from left to right: Wen Hui, Zeng Jinyan, author, Shi Tou, Wang Qi; seated, Ming Ming) [Author’s photo; photographed by Wang Yinjie]
- Fig. Intro.2 Women Makes Waves International Film Festival (wmwiff), October 2015 (Huang Yu-shan, co-founder, front row left 2; Fan Ching, chairwoman of Taiwan Women’s Film Association at the time, from row left 3; Yang Lina, filmmaker from prc, front row
- Fig.1.1 A painting of two intertwined hands suggesting intense erotic union (Passion, 1986)
- Fig.1.2 Two girlfriends rejoin their hands at long last (Passion, 1986)
- Fig.1.3 “These are the days when I missed you… Now I return them to you.” (Tempting Heart, 1999)
- Fig. 1.4 20, 30, 40: Cross-generational collaboration between three actresses and singers
- Figs. 1.5–7 Three women living in the same neighborhood experiencing an earthquake and its aftershocks
- Fig. 1.8 Tearful parting at the airport (20 30 40, 2004)
- Fig. 2.1 First Taiwan Women’s Visual Arts Festival, 1993. (Huang Yu-shan, fourth from right in the back row) (Courtesy of Huang Yu-shan)
- Fig. 2.2 “Love birds” trapped in domesticity and art, Peony Birds (1990) (Courtesy of Huang Yu-shan)
- Fig. 2.3 Mother and daughter reconcile, Peony Birds (1990) (Courtesy of Huang Yu-shan)
- Fig.2.4 Spring Cactus (1998): Urban desert (Courtesy of Huang Yu-shan)
- Fig. 2.5 Huang Ching-cheng’s self-portraiture in The Forgotten: Reflections on Eastern Pond (2005). Huang Yu-shan’s uncle, the artist, died in the tragic sinking of Takachiho Maru in 1943.
- Fig. 2.6 In Tokyo. Li Kui-hsiang, pianist, and Huan Ching-cheng’s wife, is also from Penghu. (Courtesy of Huang Yu-shan)
- Fig. 2.7 The remaining head of a sculpture of Li Kui-hsiang. Its body sank during the shipwreck.
- Fig. 2.8 Hsiu-hsiu, the art curator/conservationist with a debilitating condition, “casts light on forgotten history.” (Courtesy of Huang Yu-shan)
- Fig. 2.9 Landscape as a “theatrical field” in The Song of Chatain Mountain (2007) (Courtesy of Huang Yu-shan)
- Fig. 3.1 Old Men (1999) (Courtesy of Yang Lina)
- Fig. 3.2 Yang Lina filming in a park in Beijing, c. 2007. (Courtesy of Yang Lina)
- Fig. 3.3 “Twilight Love”: Lao An and Xiao Wei in The Loves of Lao An (2008). (Courtesy of Yang Lina)
- Fig. 3.4 Longing for the Rain, 2013. Poster designed by Wang Wo.
- Fig. 3.5 A repressed middle-class woman lost in her “spring dream” (Longing for the Rain, 2013). (Courtesy of Yang Lina)
- Fig. 3.6 A Daoist priest condemns the ghost. (Courtesy of Yang Lina)
- Fig. 3.7 Praying with a sympathetic female spirit medium. (Courtesy of Yang Lina)
- Fig. 3.8 “Talismanic Image”: A Miraculous Birth. (Courtesy of Yang Lina)
- Fig. 4.1 Egg and Stone (2011) ©yellow-green PI
- Fig. 4.2 A twenty-four-hour internet café as refuge (Foolish Bird, 2017) ©yellow-green PI
- Fig. 4.3 The concealed xianchang: Honggui’s secret (Egg and Stone, 2011)©yellow-green PI
- Fig. 4.4 Honggui sits for a portrait: art-making as healing and bonding ©️yellow-green PI
- Fig. 4.5 Honghui and Ah Jiu (Egg and Stone, 2011) ©️yellow-green PI
- Fig. 4.6 Flashback trauma: reenacting the “scene of crime” ©️yellow-green PI
- Fig. 4.7 Blood Bowel Sutra ©️yellow-green PI
- Fig.4.8 A home video on the road: Huang Ji breastfeeds Chihiro on the train ©️yellow-green PI
- Fig. 4.9 Otsuka with Chihiro in a baby carrier at a local police station ©️yellow-green PI
- Fig. 4.10 “Who cares about the Senkaku Islands?!” ©️yellow-green PI
- Fig. 5.1 Skirt (1996) (Photo by Jeff Day, courtesy of Wen Hui)
- Fig. 5.2 Memory (2008), a “documentary theater” work (courtesy of Wen Hui)
- Fig. 5.3 The open stage: shooting Dancing with the Third Grandmother. (Courtesy of Wen Hui)
- Fig.5.4 First-personal plural: Wen Hui and Third Grandmother bond through storytelling, dancing and filming. (Courtesy of Wen Hui)
- Fig. 5.5 Third Grandmother’s “spicy-painful” stories
- Fig. 5.6 “Listening” to Third Grandmother’s stories through gestures and movements. (Courtesy of Wen Hui)
- Fig. 5.7 “I’m following you”
- Fig. 5.8 “The Third Eye/I”
- Fig. 5.9 “When one is pained by heartache, dance will help.” (Dancing with Third Grandma, 2016). (Courtesy of Wen Hui)
- Fig. 6.1 Money and Honey poster: An epic documentary melodrama of migrant labor and love. (Courtesy of Jasmine Ching-hui Lee)
- Fig. 6.2 Lolita (first left) and Arlene (front right) at a recruitment agency in Manila in 1998.
- Figs. 6.3–4 Suspended mourning, belated homecoming
- Figs. 6.5–6 Animated poem, “The Clock,” in Money and Honey
- Fig. 6.7 “Sowing and Irrigating over Time”: Lolita and her children and grandchild by the river in their hometown in 2011.
- Fig. 6.8 The place of faith in Money and Honey: Marilyn prays at the church
- Fig. 6.9 “The world is the witness to our love…”: Reunion in the Philippines. (Courtesy of Jasmine Ching-hui Lee)
- Fig. 6.10 Baby and Lolita’s “homecoming” to Taiwan, 2012. (Courtesy of Jasmine Ching-hui Lee)
- Fig. 7.1 “Minor feelings”: Yau Ching in We Are Alive, “her most autobiographical work.”
- Fig. 7.2 Video Letters 1: “Dear Mona” (Courtesy of Yau Ching)
- Fig. 7.3 Video Letters 2: “I’m not you.” (Courtesy of Yau Ching)
- Fig. 7.4 “Taste of Home:” Mother in the kitchen in Ho Yuk/Let’s Love Hong Kong. (Courtesy of Yau Ching)
- Fig.7.5 I’m Starving: Yau Ching on the set in Hell’s Kitchen. (Courtesy of Yau Ching)
- Figs. 7.6–8 Macau-Hong Kong-Sapporo: An Inter-Asian Video Workshop Project
- Fig. 7.9 “Be water, my friend”: popular culture and film history as sources of healing
- Fig. 7.10 Recording a video letter for the future self. (Courtesy of Yau Ching)
- Fig. 8.1 Ai Xiaoming’s “naked” protest against child abuse, in solidarity with activist Ye Haiyan. (Courtesy of Ai Xiaoming and Zeng Jinyan)
- Fig. 8.2 Huang Shuhua seeks justice for her daughter. (Courtesy of Ai Xiaoming)
- Figs. 8.3–4 “It’s time to create feminist documentary films in China.”
- Figs. 8.5–8 “Against Phallic worship”: dialectic montage and superimposition editing calling for truth and justice.
- Fig. 8.9 Elder women guarding the evidence in the village office. (Photo by Huang Haitao, courtesy of Ai Xiaoming)
- Fig. 8.10 “I’m on your side”: Ai Xiaoming filming Three Days in Wukan Village. (Photo by Deng Chuanbin, courtesy of Ai Xiaoming)
- Figs. 8.11–12 Irish filmmaker Trish McAdam’s animation bridges women workers’ struggles across time and space.
- Figs. 8.13–15 Healing and transformation: video confession, performance, and documenting.
- Fig. 8.16 A homemade “film festival”: screening of Ai’s film and the gathering of friends and fellow activists in Ai Xiaoming’s apartment in Wuhan. (Courtesy of Zeng Jinyan and Wenhai)
- Fig. E.1 Poster for Barbarian Invasion, 2021 (Courtesy of Tan Chui-mui)
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