Chen Meiling
When Martha and Niki participated in Juste Debout, an international annual street dance contest, in 2010, the duo didn’t expect to make history as the competition’s first female champions in hip-hop dancing, traditionally a male-dominated area. While the two women enjoyed success in Stockholm, Paris and New York, their relationship faced problems.
A 90-minute documentary titled which won the Guldbagge Award for best documentary and best editing in Sweden in 2017, and has been shown in 36 countries in Africa, with more than 1 million views online, is now being screened in Beijing at an ongoing festival of Nordic films.
The documentary tells the story of how, even in the face of prejudice, the two dancers realize their dreams and also establish a strong self-identity in their field of work.
Xu Jia, 27, a Chinese visitor to the festival who lived in Sweden for three years before returning to China to start her own business, says “respect” is what came to her mind after watching it.
In Sweden, Xu adds, many girls learn how to ride horses at a young age and boys can learn knitting as a hobby or for a living.
“Maybe we are more traditional, but things have changed a lot,” Xu says referring to Chinese society. “For example, though there are still more boys in hip-hop, and more girls in Latin and ballet classes, we see cool girls on television shows such as
Twenty films from the Nordic countries on women are being shown at the 3rd Nordic Film Festival that began on March 2 and runs through Sunday.
The event is being organized by the Danish Cultural Center, the Nordic embassies and the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art.
The movies highlight women’s right to equality in society, employment and personal relationships, striking a chord with the Chinese audience.
Tora Mkandawire director of she hopes young people inspired by the films Martens, says will be being shown and learn to “stand up for what they want”.
“The challenge is to overcome the perspective that you only see women as women and men as men. Instead, you should see them as human beings, and individuals,” she says, adding that it should apply to every field.
“When I go to the office of a funder, the first thing he or she thinks about me is that I am a woman. We should see beyond this,” Martens says.
She has lived in Beijing for one and a half years with her family. When asked what she thinks of gender equality in China, Martens says: “I haven’t gone that deep, but I can see the mother’s role is really important here.”
She says she often sees both grandmothers and grandfathers playing with their grandchildren in parks, which is a nice thing.
A short film, tells the story of two women who lived in the same house on an island. The younger one prefers isolation and serenity, but the elder woman is an experimental sound artist and likes conversations. At the end of the 30-minute film, the younger woman is shown turning on a tap to submerge her co-tenant’s stereo equipment in water, which forces her to leave.
The film was a graduation work of Icelandic Elsa Maria Jakobsdottir, who studied at the National Film School of Denmark. won Iceland’s Edda Award for best short film in 2018, and received more than 200,000 views online in just two to three days.
Huang Ying, 24, a cashier in Beijing, says as an office worker, she can understand one of the charac-