Listening to Third Grandmother’s Stories
Wen Hui
Release year: 2012
Run time: 75 mins
Film type: Documentary
Synopsis
In dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Wen Hui’s film a language created by women challenges official ideology. Wen takes the stories her great-aunt tells of being tortured as a “class enemy” during the Maoist period as the basis for this poetic, experimental documentary that merges testimony and dance in black-and-white and colour.
Director biography
Wen Hui is a choreographer and dancer who also makes documentary films and installations. She is the pioneer of Chinese contemporary interdisciplinary art. She formed Living Dance Studio in Beijing in 1994 and has participated in curating and organizing numerous art projects. Wen Hui insists on using theatre as an intervention into society and has been researching the ways the body forms an archive of personal social documentation, using personal means to experiment on how bodily memory catalyses collision between history and reality.