2-4pm Panel: Women’s cinema and women filmmakers from contemporary China

Rights Feminism and Queer Women's Filmmaking and Activism in China

Jia Tan, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Clare Hall Visiting Fellow, University of Cambridge.

Rethinking Women's Stories in Chinese Independent Cinema

Xiang Fan, postdoc researcher for the AHRC-funded project on Chinese independent cinema, Newcastle University

When seeing yourself makes you feel seen: reading women directors' films with online audiences

Noemi Lemoine-Blanchard, Film Studies PhD Candidate, King's College London

Women's personal experimental nonfiction cinema: essaying, breathing and meditating the inner world

Kiki Tianqi Yu, Senior Lecturer in Film, Queen Mary University of London, Director and co-curator of ‘Dancing with Water’ film season

4:30-6:10pm Screening of Egg and Stone (dir. Huang Ji, 2012)

Huang Ji’s remarkable feature debut on the experience of coming-of-age girls in rural China, who are also part of the country’s left-behind children —kids who remain in the countryside while one or both of their parents depart for the city to work. Set in Huang’s own home village in Hunan Province and made exclusively with non-professional actors, this powerful semi-autobiographic film tells the story of a fourteen-year-old girl Honggui as she grapples with the trauma of sexual assault, while desiring for love and care from her own mother who has left her for work for seven years. Winning Tiger Award at International Film Festival Rotterdam, the film marks the rise of a promising woman director in contemporary China.

6:20-7:20 pm Huang Ji in conversation with Kiki Tianqi Yu

In this conversation, Kiki will invite Huang Ji to talk about her experience of making Egg and Stone (2012), The Foolish Bird (2017) and Stonewalling(2023), her thinking of women's position and situations in contemporary China, the aesthetic style of her cinema, her collaboration with her husband Ryuji Otsuka, and her thought on women's cinema in China and more broadly. 

Huang Ji (born. 1984) studied screenwriting at the Beijing Film Academy. Her feature directorial debut Egg and Stone (2012) won the Tiger Award at Rotterdam and the Andrei Tarkovsky IFF Grand Prix in 2013. Her second feature film The Foolish Bird(2007), co-directed with Ryuji Otsuka, earned a Special Mention from the Generation 14+ International Jury at the 2017 Berlinale. We will screen Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka’s most recent feature Stonewalling(2023) at the Garden cinema on 10 March at 1:30pm.

About the panellists:

Jia Tan is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. In 2023, she held the position of Global Fellow at the University of St. Andrews and was also a Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam. Jia Tan obtained her doctoral degree in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Southern California. She is the author of Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China (New York University Press, 2023). She is also interested in fantasy media and environmental humanities. Her research has been funded by Social Science Research Council, Hong Kong Research Grants Council, Harold Lloyd Foundation, and so on. She is on the editorial boards of Communication, Culture, and Critique as well as Journal of Chinese Cinemas. She is also one of the founding members of Hong Kong Scholars Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity.

Xiang FAN is a postdoc researcher for the AHRC-funded project on Chinese independent cinema, at Newcastle University. Her research focuses on independent and art cinema, film festival and exhibition culture, women’s cinema, and diaspora and community-led storytelling. Her monography Contemporary Art Cinema Culture in China is forthcoming as part of Bloomsbury’s ‘Global East Asian Screen Cultures’ book series.

Noemi Lemoine-Blanchard, also known as nomes, is a Film Studies PhD student at King's College London. Her research focuses on contemporary women's cinema in the PRC. She looks specifically at online audiences' reception of feature films by women directors.

She graduated in Chinese studies and Film Exhibition and Curation from the University of Edinburgh. She worked on programming for a few Chinese film festivals and seasons. Growing up in France, her understanding of patriarchy and women's liberation coincidentally began as she volunteered for women's film festivals in Beijing in 2015.

Kiki Tianqi Yu is a writer, filmmaker, and curator. She is Senior Lecturer in Film at Queen Mary University of London. Her research explores cinema and moving image art in relation to personal expressions, decoloniality, and eastern philosophies, with a focus on creative documentary, essayistic nonfiction, women’s cinema and Chinese cinemas. She is the author of ‘My’ Self on Camera: First Person Documentary Practice in an Individualising China (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), the co-editor of China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the 21 Century (Bloomsbury 2014) and Studies in Documentary Film special issue “Feminist Approaches in Women’s First Person Documentaries from East Asia” (2020). Kiki’s award-winning films includes Photographing Shenzhen(2006), China’s van Goghs (2016), and The Two Lives of Li Ermao (2019). She curated Polyphonic China: Chinese independent documentary (London 2009), New Generation Chinese Cinema (London 2010), Memory Talks (Shanghai 2017) and The Spirit of Mountains and Water (London 2023). She is currently working on 'Daoism and Cinema' .