Director's statement

From Director WEN Hai
My 2017 feature film We the Workers presents stories of male workers and labor NGO workers/activists, while Outcry and Whisper portraits female workers’ lives, work and protesting experiences. Since 2009, I have followed female workers’ stories and worked on conceptualizing their stories into a feature film design about Chinese women. The Chinese title of the film is “喊叫與耳語 (Outcry and Whisper)”. “喊叫 (Outcry)”, is the fury of the mass. “耳語 (Whisper)”, is the personal monologue. In the film, protagonist Zeng Jinyan, an activist and an intellectual, speaks in a secret video diary of her traumatic experience of resisting gendered and political oppression. Her stories bring to light ongoing struggles for autonomy, which resurface again and again in stories of Chinese women from all walks of life: the lonely female worker LI Ning in one of the biggest flax factories in the world, who is facing a situation of marrying a stranger; the worker turned labour NGO activist ZHU Xiaomei, who was laid off for helping workers defend their rights; a group of female workers from Xinsheng Shoe Factory, HUANG Jie, XIANG Zhiiing, YU Sanmei, and QING Qingmei, self-organizing to defend their basic rights; a group of feminists gathering at Ai Xiaoming’s Guangzhou flat turned semi-theater; Tiananmen mothers persisting for justice of killed children, and artists using their own bodies to reclaim autonomy and justice.

From Producer, Co-director and Scriptwriter ZENG Jinyan
After moving to Hong Kong in 2012, I created a video diary in secret to deal with the unbearable gendered and political violence I faced. The process of creating a video diary protected me from breaking down and opened a new opportunity for me through which to understand human dignity. Now, having a certain level of distance from these traumatic experiences, I am able to revisit this footage. Watching all worker, artist, activist, and intellectual protagonists’ images and listening to their voices in preparing for Outcry and Whisper, I at times found myself in tears, understanding the pain and strength of being Outcry and Whisper. With emotional, artistic, intellectual, and all kinds of support from director WEN Hai, animation director Trish McAdam, and my PhD advisor Prof. Sik Ying Ho, as a feminist scholar I aim to portray and interrogate various kinds of violence, healing and empowering in its many different forms through the film Outcry and Whisper.

From Animation Director Trish McAdam
I feel lucky to have been asked to work on Outcry and Whisper with such a cross-cultural, free speaking, creative team. My animation contribution comes from an invitation to respond, as a female artist, to unedited footage of WEN Hai’s, Outcry and Whisper. This invitation arose out of a cultural dialogue between Zeng Jinyan and myself, which is on-going for more than five years. During these five years I have realized that Jinyan and myself, our cultures and experiences, have more in common than different. This is manifest in Outcry and Whisper, for me most heart felt, in my drawing and animating of a sequence of Chinese worker's faces. In the process of working on the film I feel I have gotten to know the women protagonists intimately, and found that in drawing them they ceased to be Chinese – what was important for was to catch their expression, and, in an expression you find universality, cross cultural commonality. Women, across the world have no more or no less struggle with their multiple roles; friend, lover, mother, worker, artist, boss, and more. A changing environment of new technology, the rise of feminism and globalization, all has real impacts on their domestic, social, and work relationships everywhere.