The Female Gaze in Chinese Films

Huang Ji's brave personal film is one of the most auspicious debuts in recent Chinese cinema. Huang Ji's visual sophistication, narrative fluency, and technical polish belie her youth. Cinematographer Ryuji Otsuka contributes beautifully crafted cinematic images, fearfully intimate, softly pulsing with light, saturated with complex emotional power. Part of "Egg And Stone" also depends on Huang's own past experience. It is not only a film, but also a new start for the director to bid farewell to the past and start a new life.

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.

Set against the backdrop of contemporary China’s technocratic and dissimulated culture industry, Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka’s contemplatively paced film "The Foolish Bird" articulates a moral gaze towards China’s disgruntled and alienated youth, a sector fully consolidated into China’s technocratic system. Precise images tell a story of the isolation and lack of perspective prevalent in a small city in today’s China.

Continuing the concern for rural children, Yao Honggui starring in "Egg and Stone" was also the main character in "The Foolish Bird." The film captured her three-year growth.

Returning to the subject of China’s “left-behind children”—sent to live with relatives while their parents seek better paying work elsewhere—Huang crafts the intimate, troubling tale of Lynn (Honggui Yao, returning), a teenager trying to find her way in the dead-end Hunan province town where she lives with her grandparents, hemmed in on all sides by seemingly insurmountable social barriers, routine abuse of power, and the threat of sexual violence, her only refuge her friendship with another local girl, May (Fang Yao). Grimly grand, and as tough as the truth.

"Old Men" is one of the first DV-shot nonfiction films to come from China, presaging the work of Wang Bing, and a prizewinner at Cinéma du Réel in 2000, making it a landmark in wider international recognition of independent Chinese documentary—a field in which women like Yang continue to fight for recognition.

A quiet, observational film that embeds us among a community of senior citizens in a Beijing suburb—the most honored members of society according to the old Confucian system, but in modern China, increasingly marginalized and disposable.

After the winter, some old men finally passed away and the other old men discussed about their lost friends and continued their chat ...

Yang had to shoot her fiction feature “Longing for the Rain” debut in Hong Kong, knowing that Chinese censors wouldn’t approve the subject matter of her erotically charged drama.

Comfortable housewife Fang Lei (Siyuan Zhao) has achieved the “Chinese Dream,” but something is missing—something she can’t qualify until the vision of a consummate lover appears to her in dreams, and her craving for his touch begins to take over her waking life. A new gloss on the Chinese ghost story, a taboo acknowledgement of spiritual starvation in the nouveau riche middle classes, and a scathing indictment of patriarchal society.

Written, directed and acted by female director Yang Ming Ming, "Girls Always Happy" is an outstanding feature movie that discuss families and humanities. It was shown in China Art Film Festival on CCF2018.

After breaking up with her boyfriend, Wu rents a house in a Beijing hutong. She is excited about living alone until her mother moves in with her. A bizarre war sets off between them, disrupting every aspect of their lives. The two women, feeling extremely insecure, launch salvos agains one another. Each begins a romance, but their struggle to peacefully coexist is not without challenges.

"Girls Always Happy" confronts the contemporary city life with a brand new perspective, and portrays with astonishing precision, the spectacle of mutual repulsion, hatred, and harm in a single mother-daughter relationship in a Beijing Hutong. Yet from the despair grows the power of tender love.

As director puts it, this is not a movie that promotes the warmth of the family. This is a movie analyzed with a surgical scalpel. Starting from a cross-section of the life of a mother and daughter in contemporary Beijing, drama and calmness coexist in the movie, re-interpretating the history of tenderness and happy in contemporary China.