Director biography

Hu Jie is an independent historian, artist, and filmmaker. Born in Jinan, Shandong in 1958, he graduated from the Art College of the People’s Liberation Army. He works in oils and woodcuts from his lakeside studio in Nanjing. His films are among the most important documents of China’s unacknowledged “unoffcial history”, and include Looking for Lin Zhao’s Soul (2005), about a martyr-poet critic of Mao; and Though I Am Gone (2007), about an elite Beijing girls’ high school whose students murdered their headmaster at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.

Ai Xiaoming is a feminist professor at Sun Yat-Sen (Zhongshan) University, the Director of the Comparative Literature Section in the Department of Chinese, and the Program Leader of the Sex/Gender Education Forum. She has also worked as a translator and director for the Chinese version of the performance 'The Vagina Monologues.' Additionally, she has collaborated with Hu Jie on documentaries such as 'Taishi Village,' 'Painting for the Revolution - Peasant Paintings from Hu County, China,' 'White Rainbow,' and 'The Vagina Monologues: Stories from China.' The latter was selected for the Women’s Film Festival organized by City University of New York as a side event of the United Nations' 49th session of the Commission on the Status of Women.