Director biography

Born in 1969 into a family of Miao, an ethnic minority in south-west China’s Guizhou Province, Shi Tou is an artist, photographer, independent filmmaker and queer activist. Her 2006 experimental documentary Women Fifty Minutes is a compilation of various shots and impressions of the filmmaker’s trip to her lesbian partner Mingming’s hometown, as well as her daily wandering in Beijing. Her 2015 documentary We Are Here (co-directed with Zhao Jing) about the history of lesbian activism in the People’s Republic of China was commissioned by the Ford Foundation Beijing Office to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Fourth UN World Conference on Women and to document the progress of women’s rights in China since 1995.