Gate·Mountain·River

Shi Tou

Release year: 2006

Run time: 10 mins

Film type: Video work

It projects different images superimposed together: an inverted image of a crowd with the Great Wall as the background, a city ravaged by a sandstorm, two girls holding hands, an elderly man who resembles an archaeologist in a Zhongshan Suit using a magnifier to read an article in a newspaper titled 'Homosexuality is not explicitly prohibited by law,' and slowly examining a photo of two kissing girls. Sounds emerge as a trembling dancer, Dohee, glides across the floor on her tiptoes until she shouts from the depths of her heart. Collaboration: Video and music, Dancer Dohee LEE, Korean American. Percussion Artists Jimm Biala (American) and Leon Lee (American) performed together in May 2005 at the South Gate Space of the 798 Arts District. The combination of video and reality is intricately woven together.

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.

Film Database

Gate·Mountain·River