We Are Here
Shi Tou and Zhao Jing
Release year: 2015
Run time: 58 mins
Film type: Documentary
Synopsis
What happens when 300 lesbians from around the world attend the largest United Nations conference? How did two busloads of lesbians headed to an underground nightclub help spark the birth of a lala (LBT) movement in China? At the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, the first-ever lesbian tent at a UN NGO Forum was created. At the tent, ideas were shared, connections were made, and identities were affirmed . . . with a growing emergence of energy for change.
Director biography
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.
Zhao Jing is a publisher, multimedia producer, co-founder and chief-editor of les+, a major media outlet for the queer women community in China. Jing has been a pioneer LGBT activist in China since 2005.