Ai Xiaoming

Shot over an eight-year period (2007-2015), this documentary film aims to present women’s struggle in the private and public spheres, both in China and Hong Kong. It offers a view into the lives of female factory workers, artists, rights activists, and intellectuals – whom deal with political violence, sexual harassment, online bullying, long-term separation from family, arbitrary treatment by transnational factory management, and/or poverty in their home villages.

Tayuan is the location of the first museum of the Cultural Revolution in China. However, this important Cultural Revolution museum was established with private funds. The reason for its construction here is that there is a tomb of the victims of the Cultural Revolution. This film documents the little-known massacre and the construction of the Cultural Revolution Museum in Shantou, Guangdong during the Cultural Revolution. However, a few years later, this museum was banned by the government.

The launch and development of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution not only has a series of CCP Central Committee documents that have promoted wave after wave of movements, but also has various propaganda methods. A large number of different types of literary and artistic products have been produced in a collective form and with the input of the State. As a weapon of revolutionary struggle, works of art are important representatives of this period. Art was a tool for the Cultural Revolution; it fully embodies its aesthetic characteristics, actively cooperating with the development of various movements and the popularization of ideas. It has cultivated the values ​​and visual experience of a generation of Chinese people — the paintings of the Cultural Revolution have been regarded as treasures by Chinese collectors. This film shows the characteristics of the Cultural Revolution paintings through a large number of paintings, as well as the bloody violence and despotism behind them.

Hu County, in suburban Xi’an, is famous for its peasant paintings, produced in 1958 during the Great Leap Forward. It became particularly famous during the Cultural Revolution, when these works were hailed as model paintings. In 2005, the directors visited the county and interviewed both the painters and their teachers. Comparing different political languages and artistic imaginings across the ages, the film draws on diverse sources: old documentary film clips, new propaganda paintings, Beijing Opera in the local “Qin” accent, and traces of the old amongst the new. All these elements are engaged to help us better understand the painters and the phenomenon of propaganda paintings

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, in an attempt to stop the spread of AIDS, the Chinese government sought a “purer” blood supply from its rural population. Burdened by agricultural taxes and rising costs of education and health care, many peasants sold blood to state and private blood-collectors. Due to lack of sanitary control, a large number of blood-sellers were infected with HIV. Starting from the mid-1990s, AIDS villages multiplied.

In the spring of 2004, a female graduate student was killed at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, but it was confirmed on the school's website that girls should not refuse male love. This film documents how Chinese professor Ai Xiaoming led the fight back against such patriarchal thinking.

Hu Jie and Ai Xiaoming co-directed short film.

By following the case of Huang Jing, a woman teacher who died of date rape, this documentary captures changes in China between 2003 and 2005, before and after the injunction to respect and protect human rights was incorporated into the constitution. By highlighting grassroots activity by women, the film illustrates awareness of human rights, women’s struggle against judicial corruption, and women taking action against domestic violence in China.