REAL WONDER WOMEN A young film festival in China is seeking to grow while fighting stock gender portrayals in popular culture. Satarupa Bhattacharjya reports.
The China Women’s Film Festival opened in Beijing on Saturday, with dozens of female filmmakers from home and abroad prepared to screen their work over the next few days at different venues in the city, including on university campuses. In its fifth year, the annual event aims to provide a platform for independent cinema on women. This year’s festival is showing at least 45 foreign and Chinese films under seven sections covering topics such as violence and discrimination against women, the LGBT community, female innovators and gender stereotypes. A special “Chinese competition” section has 15 entries, of which, two are from Hong Kong and the rest from the mainland.
Gender equality, along with fighting poverty and climate change, were among 17 sustainable development goals set for 2030 by member countries of the United Nations in 2015.
But to achieve gender equality, the discriminatory projection of women in media will need to stop, Julie Broussard, the country program manager of UN Women China, said at the film festival’s opening ceremony at Instituto Cervantes.
“We desperately need alternative narratives that help to overcome stereotypes,” she said.
The festival seeks to generate greater awareness of women’s rights among its audience, Li Dan, founder and executive director of Crossroads Centre, said at the same event.
His Beijing-based nonprofit is the main organizer of the festival, which is supported by UN Women and the embassies of two European countries, among others.
“Wonder Woman (the boxoffice hit based on the comic book superhero) isn’t the identity we want to promote because she isn’t a representative” of the real struggles of women, Li said, citing an example of the kind of cinema that is less likely to make it to the festival.
The festival started with the 2014 Spanish feature film Todos Estan Muertos (They Are All Dead) — a story about a woman’s difficulty to move on with life after the death of her brother with whom she shared a passion for rock music and a close but complex relationship. The film hinges on the healing power of farewells.
China, the world’s secondlargest movie market after the United States, is dominated by male filmmakers.
There were almost no female filmmakers for years after the industry started in China in 1905, analysts say.
While the numbers have improved in recent times, the country’s female filmmakers don’t enjoy the same visibility as their male peers.
The festival is seen as offering a space to such female directors, especially young film school graduates, Li says.
The lack of funding is another challenge that female filmmakers face in China, which possibly explains why some prefer documentaries over other genres.
“Many investors feel that a male director is in better control of a film. It is a greater insurance,” says Wang Xinyi, a 27-year-old filmmaker in Beijing.
Wang’s film The Relic — being screened at the festival — is an experimental short film in which she uses projections and special effects to show the other side of China’s urbanization.
The film focuses on her hometown, Taiyuan in the country’s northern Shanxi province, where she spent her growing up years but could no longer recognize upon revisiting it in 2014.
All films in the Chinese repertoire tell stories of ordinary people — some are set in urbanizing eastern towns such as Yiwu, a world manufacturing hub of small commodity, Heze and Pingdu, while others are about personal losses, the mainland’s fastchanging social landscape and mother-child bond.
Foreign entries in the festival include the documentary Tchindas, which is about a transgender person from Cape Verde, an island country in West Africa. She came out in the local media in 1998.
The section on female innovators is showing four films from the US and Switzerland. The festival’s curators mention in a brochure the US, China, Japan and India as countries that are offering grants to women in science and technology, and say the section spotlights the women who have enjoyed great success in the field despite the pushback they received in the process of attaining it.
The fifth China Women’s Film Festival ends on Sunday. Contact the writer at satarupa@chinadaily.com.cn