Our Story: The Beijing Queer Film Festival’s 10 Years of “Guerrilla Warfare”
Yang Yang
Release year: 2012
Run time: 42 mins
Film type: Documentary
Synopsis
This documentary tells the story of the 10-year “guerrilla warfare” waged by the Beijing Queer Film Festival (BJQFF). Originating at Peking University in 2001, the festival has taken place six—now seven—times to date. Considered the first of its kind, the BJQFF is the only continuous, community-based non-governmental film festival with a special focus on gender and sexuality in China. Given the politically sensitive nature of LGBTQ issues in China, as well as China’s strict media censorship, the festival has encountered enormous difficulties in its development. In the past 13 years, its venue has shifted from the western suburbs to the eastern, and from city to countryside. In 2011 it returned to the city and embraced a true guerrilla strategy due to government intervention and censorship. Based on recorded footage collected by the BJQFF organizing committee each year, Our Story contains interviews with committee members, letting them tell the story of the festival and of themselves.
Director biography
Graduated from Peking University with a degree in French linguistics and literature in 2004, she went to Université Libre de Bruxelles (Brussels) to study cultural management from 2007-2010. Her master thesis “From Queer to Tongzhi – a comparative case study about thematic film festival related to sexuality and gender in Belgium and in the three Chinas” received the “François Delor Prize” given by the Ministry for Higher Education in the French Community of Belgium and “Arc-en-Ciel” Association. She worked for Belgian Royal Film Archives – Chinese Film Fund, served as artistic director for European-China-Audiovisual-Network, and curated lots of film cultural events including retrospective of Belgian documentarist Henri Storck.
Yang Yang currently lives in Beijing where she is planning to start a first women film festival in China.