Prof. Xiaoming talks to students about feminism in China.

Chinese documentary film maker and human rights activist Ai Xiaoming visits Lake Forest College

By: Kristin Kojzarek

Posted: 10/2/08

In a culture that still struggles with human rights issues that have caused some parents to abandon their baby daughters, documentary filmmaker Ai Xiaoming has taken the bold step of directing one of the most feminist theater productions, The Vagina Monologues, in her home country of China.

Sponsored by Asia Studies, Women and Gender Studies, the Ethics Center, Modern Languages, and the Mojekwu Fund for Intercultural Understanding, Xiaoming visited Lake Forest College last Thursday. She presented clips from her films in the McCormick Auditorium and spoke about how her productions were received in China, as well as her experiences as a human rights activist. Xiaoming, a Professor of Communications and director of the sex and gender education forum at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, has been an activist for promotion of women's studies curricula and felt there was a lack of representation for Chinese women.

The Vagina Monologues, produced to be part of a Stop Domestic Violence program in China, was staged by her students in 2003. Although there are places in China where it was banned, The Vagina Monologues received an overwhelming positive response from the media. This led Xiaoming to direct her first documentary film, The Vagina Monologues: Stories Behind the Scenes with director Hu Jie in 2004. This became the first of several projects Xiaoming worked on as she found film to be a way she could capture people's stories in order to promote human rights.

"I felt documentary film was a tool that worked well for human rights because it is an affordable way to inform people, and it allows us to think critically, to ask questions, and to deal with these issues," Xiaoming said.

One film clip Xiaoming played for the audience, The Abandoned Baby Dance, is a poignant dramatization of an issue that she said she found to be China specific. In this clip, 28 dancers in traveling bags fall to the ground in order to portray female-abandoned babies. The other dancers represent the mothers and try to express, through dance, the pain and sorrow of leaving a child.

"I decided to pick one issue each year to focus on," Xiaoming said. "I try to interview people and hear their stories and express them."

his is just one of several projects she has done. One film she made in 2006, The Epic of Central Plain, documents poverty-stricken patients in the Henan province who were infected with the AIDS virus due to lack of proper viral inspection of blood used in transfusions. Because of this scandal, thousands of people were infected with HIV and most were refused any type of compensation from the hospitals.

"Just as with the tainted milk powder scandal happening now, coverage raises awareness and mobilizes people," Xiaoming said. "We need to learn the lessons from these tragedies and find out why and how they happened," she added.

In 2007, she followed that project with a film about a care house made for children with HIV in Hebei. The film, entitled Care and Love, won a film festival award. It documented people living with the disease, the stigma they bear, and care house volunteer's fight for rights and support.

Some students reacted to the moving scenes in Xiaoming's film clips with surprise. "It opened my eyes to the plight of the Chinese people and although she was hard to understand, her footage was enlightening," Lake Forest College senior Christine Arnoid said. Senior Anjali Ajailkomar commented, "The film clips and visuals were very interesting. I thought it gave insight to the inequalities that we don't see in China."

Audience members also showed interest in Xiaoming's life in China and the bravery she displays as an activist. Due to the nature of the issues Xiaoming documents, local government has threatened her. Local authorities see activists as troublemakers who are subject to arrest.

"The local government, of course, doesn't like ther films, and it is the local people and activists who face more threats because they are on the forefront," she said.

Regardless of resistance, Xiaoming wants to continue to share the power of other people's efforts and experiences. With technology making it easier to do, she hopes to keep asking the questions that mainstream media will not. Whereas mainstream filmmakers begin shooting several days or weeks after an event has occurred, Xiaoming collaborates with local people on site, first hand. Some of the secenes she filmed are unedited raw footage.

"Those are the most valuable scenes becasue they allow the power of the issues to be felt emotionally, and today's technology makes them [the images] easier to capture," Xiaoming said. "I wish more people could do it."