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Self-Portrait with Three Women

Zhang Mengqi

Release year: 2010

Run time: 70 mins

Film type: Documentary

Synopsis

This year I turned 23, the age when women become pregnant with dreams. Yet, even while nursing our own dreams, we must carry the burdens of two other women’s dreams as well. This film began with my own search, then delving into my mother and her mother, where blood has flowed through three generations, in these women who grew up in such different times. As a victim of an oppressive marriage, my grandmother held hopes for my mother to enter a beautiful, perfect marriage. When my mother became a victim herself, she turned those hopes to me. Marriage may be every girl’s dream, but it is also the murderer of those dreams.

 

Director biography

Zhang Mengqi was born in 1987. She graduated from the Dance Academy of China’s Minorities University in 2008. Since 2009, she has been a resident artist at CCD Workstation. She makes documentary films: Self-portrait with Three Women (2010), Self-Portrait: At 47 KM (2011), Self-portrait: Dancing at 47 KM (2012), Self-portrait: Dreaming at 47 km (2013), Self-portrait: Bridging at 47 KM (2014), Self-portrait: Dying at 47 KM (2015), Self-portrait: Born in 47 KM (2016), and Self-portrait: Sphinx in 47 KM (2017), her “Self-Portrait” series.