Nurturing Open Memories: Film for Mother 2024

On Sunday, 12 May 2024, an online crowd of over 100 participants gathered to bid farewell to the two-month-long Film for Mother Festival (hereinafter referred to as Mother Festival), beating the drum for the wonderful films they had watched and celebrating the spirit of independent filmmaking in an age where memories fade too quickly. 

At first glance, Mother Festival may seem like many other film festivals out there: with its clearly defined theme on motherhood, it showcases a lineup of both feature-length and short films carefully programmed by a crew of curators. Then, upon closer inspection, one might be pleasantly surprised – the festival is free of charge, completely online, quite lengthy in duration, and very interdisciplinary in nature.

Running from 8 March to 12 May, Mother Festival spanned ten weekends, bounded by Women’s Day and Mother’s Day. As an online festival, it took place on VooV Meeting, the Chinese equivalent of Zoom, using the real-time screen-sharing feature to present films to audiences across various locations and time zones. Unlike the conventional festival experience, where attendees can rack up hefty expenses traveling to physical venues, participants of Mother Festival gathered in the virtual theatre, free from the stress of delayed flights, traffic jams, and costly accommodation. From the comfort of their own homes, they accessed the festival via mobile phones and laptops, tuning in for a communal experience shared with fellow film enthusiasts represented by aliases and avatars.

What is cinema? What defines a cinematic experience? Does a screen-sharing online meeting qualify as a film festival? Dubious and curious, I entered the virtual theatre of Mother Festival for the first time with these questions hovering in my mind. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, I attended a few online film festivals that, to put it bluntly, lacked the spirit of festivity. The pay-per-view online screenings, a daunting departure from in-person events, felt no different from watching Netflix or YouTube – isolated, lonesome, and devoid of communal excitement. However, I had never joined a film festival hosted in the form of a cloud-based webinar. Soon after the curtain lifted for the opening ceremony of Mother Festival, I was struck by the ingenuity of hosting a film festival on a video conferencing platform. With features like live chat, emoji reactions, and instant transcription, the virtual gathering came alive with energy. The group chat overflowed with supportive comments as symbols of hearts, applause and thumbs-up flew across the screen in the danmanku-style flurry during the 60-minute opening performance. 

Mother Theatre

Seven middle-aged women appeared on the gridded screen, forming an H-shaped stage, with the top and bottom tiles in the central row left black. They took turns in the centre, sharing personal stories about motherhood, while those positioned on the sides enriched the narrative with expressive gestures and movements. Despite being located in different parts of China, their real-time collaboration in the webinar brought them together in a two-dimensional space, transforming the virtual interface into a multi-screen arthouse. Each tile was, in fact, a miniature theatre, encompassing a wealth of detail in the background — the living spaces of these women, their very homes. From the adornments on the walls to the furniture behind them, these mundane parts of everyday life became props that immerse the audience in a fictionalised reality. Here, life is a piece of cinema in progress, being made, adapted, and screened at the same time. 

This live performance was brought to life by seven mothers in retirement, each one a budding filmmaker in her own right. Their participation in Mother Festival was encouraged by their children, who are creative professionals connected to the festival committee and keen on exploring their mothers’ stories. “They shouldn’t just be the object of our films,” remarked Liang Chouwa, filmmaker and committee member, as she recognised the creative agency of mothers themselves. “They should be telling their own stories.” Indeed, stories of mothers are rarely told by mothers themselves. “Mother” is a name so powerfully charged with social meanings that it becomes misleadingly self-explanatory, as if it is always-already telling its own story. Mother Festival, with its associated programs and events, provides an opportunity to unpack the dense concept of “mother” and unearth the real people hidden beneath this label. Through dozens of online workshops, these women in their 50s and 60s were guided to reflect on their own bodies and histories, which culminated in the group performance and their individual films.

The opening performance and the films made by the mothers represent only a fraction of the festival’s rich programming; Mother Festival offers much more. Featuring a total of 26 films, alongside the mothers’ contributions, each weekend treated attendees to screenings arranged by theme, complemented by Q&A sessions, guest talks, and panel discussions. Most of the films were selected from the 72 entries submitted by Chinese filmmakers worldwide, while the festival committee – consisting of 15 volunteers who are filmmakers, scholars, and cultural workers – also chose works from international talents such as Miko Revereza and Bálint Révész. Led by Zhang Mengqi, a documentary filmmaker renowned for her Self-Portrait series, the committee curated this year’s festival around the concept of “Filming as Nurturing,” inspired by the insights of Japanese scholar and translator Akiyama Tamako, who likened the act of documenting one’s life through film to the nurturing role of a mother.

Film For Mother 2024

This year marks the third anniversary of Mother Festival, which emerged during the peak of the Covid pandemic from online screenings organised by Caochangdi Workstation, an independent art community founded by filmmaker Wu Wenguang. Following in the footsteps of other Caochangdi initiatives like the Folk Memory Project, Mother Festival focuses on the social intention and function of cinema.¹ With the aspiration to democratize filmmaking, the festival embraces voices from all walks of life, advocating that anyone with access to a digital camera has the potential to capture meaningful fragments of society and history through their own lens. 

Authenticity, above all else, is prioritised at Mother Festival. The majority of the selected films were created by amateur, and even first-time, filmmakers who use the audiovisual language to tell stories in a deeply personal tone. Their footage, captured with phones and webcams, interspersed with screenshots and screen recordings, comes accompanied by muffled dialogues and substandard sound – these low-to-no budget films exude an air of unfiltered realness. Yet, it is precisely in this rawness that the authenticity of the stories truly shines through. Without fancy camerawork and high technical skills, these filmmakers rely on raw emotion, honesty and ingenuity to convey their narratives.

Qiu Xue Lu Shang (On the Way to School)

One of the mothers, Xiao Fengyu, born in the early 1950s, made a short film called Qiu Xue Lu Shang (On the Way to School, 2024) using a series of her own drawings to revisit a past that has left no visual trace. Having no photos or videos from her early years, she dove into her memories and wielded her pen to represent her personal history of pursuing education within an impoverished family. The film is a simple yet touching autoethnographic account that reveals key episodes from an ordinary peasant’s youth. With Xiao’s voice-over in her local dialect, the audience is guided through her experiences in the style of lianhuanhua, or serial picture stories, which were popular in socialist China. Through a conscious selection of events and details, Xiao thoughtfully imagines her life story from a third-person perspective, connecting memory with history, and past with present. Her work, shaped by major periods like the Cultural Revolution, offers a personal, non-elitist perspective often missing from grand narratives.

Lao Wu Lao (No Country for My Maternal Grandma)

Like Xiao, many filmmakers at Mother Festival present personalised visions of social and historical issues. They zoom in on diverse predicaments faced by women of all ages, using “mother” as a metaphorical anchor to address social issues beyond motherhood. Among the documentaries that stood out to me is Chen Bowen’s Lao Wu Lao (No Country for My Maternal Grandma, 2023), a five-year chronicle that follows the journey of his octogenarian grandmother, who, uprooted by a government demolition project, struggles to find a sense of belonging under the roofs of her own children. The film unveils the existential upheaval of an elder, whose long-defined identity as a caretaker is disrupted by the forceful loss of her own home and the ensuing loss of authority within the family. Offering a glimpse into his grandma’s world, Chen’s film prompts us to consider the broader social dynamics of aging and the complexity of elderly care within familiar contexts. 

Another film that resonated with me is Fan Wenxuan’s Huan (Born Again, 2023), an endearing documentation of her mother’s post-divorce transformation. This process of rebirth is poignantly marked by the long-awaited removal of a contraceptive ring – a symbol of the patriarchal constraints imposed upon her mother’s body during China’s one-child policy era. By blending old home movies with newly filmed footage, the young filmmaker attempts to immerse herself in her mother’s narrative, both past and present, striving to understand her mother not just as a parent, but as a woman who has experienced loss, fear, and desire.  

Continuing the thread that entwines the personal with the political, Beijing-born filmmaker Wang Yinan’s bilingual documentary Tuo Gou (Decoupling, 2023) provides a profound exploration of multigenerational trauma within his diasporic family. Residing in the U.S. during the pandemic, Wang and his wife were torn apart from their infant daughter. This agonizing separation, set against a backdrop of political uncertainty, inspired the filmmaker to link present-day struggles with the historical wounds of his parents. The film serves as a rich repository of expressions about motherhood, interweaving the director’s observations of two maternal figures – his wife and his own mother – with insightful contemplation of ideas such as motherland and mother tongue. Recognised for its depth, the film was acclaimed as the most popular at Mother Festival.

Tuo Gou (Decoupling)

The aforementioned films, assuming alternative recordings for social histories through private practices of memorialisation, exemplify a visual “history from below.”² Such an introspective, family-centric ethos is wholeheartedly embraced at Mother Festival, which seeks to highlight the significance of personal stories that might otherwise be swept away in an era of increasing state control, where “internet – and collective online memory – is disappearing in chunks.”³ 

Standing against the tide of forgetfulness, Mother Festival gathers individuals in the communal warmth of cinema, igniting a renewed hope for the freedom of expression. It carves out a space where people can actively participate in the cinematic process, serving both as creators and audience, to channel their emotions in the pursuit of storytelling and remembering. This focus on personal engagement underlies Mother Festival’s mission to foster a community of shared understanding and dialogue. Intentionally designed as a non-competitive film festival, it places a great emphasis on building strong connections between filmmakers and audiences. Each screening is not just an end in itself, but a beginning – a catalyst for stimulating conversations moderated by the festival committee. It is here that attendees delve into the specific challenges of filmmaking, and communicate their feelings about shared traumas, navigating a broad spectrum of topics and sentiment. These discussions ensure that the exchange of ideas and emotions is as vital as the films themselves. 

Such space is precious. In the face of escalating political scrutiny, maintaining the grassroots exhibition culture in China has become increasingly difficult; as a result, the number of film clubs committed to exhibiting domestic films without the official “dragon seal” is dwindling.⁴ Caochangdi’s Mother Festival, born into its digital form during the pandemic, might be a blissful solution to the obstacles faced by traditional in-person screenings. In the virtual theatre, where the public gaze is averted, individuals forge emotional connections over stories that might otherwise be erased or forgotten, bonded not by physical proximity but by shared moments in time. 

In many ways, Mother Festival embodies a nurturing essence, akin to a “motherly” figure. It tenderly cares for the growth of filmmakers, cultivating a sanctuary for personal memories and giving rise to non-mainstream voices and opinions. Over the course of ten weekends, I was deeply enriched by the films and discussions, which introduced me to a diverse array of artists and thinkers spanning filmmaking, performing arts, and non-fiction writing. What truly captivated me was the unexpected international dimension of what might have seemed a local festival. The panel discussion led by Peruvian curators Ivonne Sheen and Viola Varotto on female-centric decolonial curatorship was inspiring, as was the session with Japanese documentary filmmaker Oda Kaori, who shared intimate stories about her relationship with her mother. These experiences underscored the festival’s vision of building an ultimately borderless community, where a new film culture can thrive beyond physical and ideological boundaries. 

I wish to conclude this report with a touching moment from my first Q&A session at the Mother Festival. As the credits rolled on the film, a gentle request echoed through the virtual space: participants were encouraged to turn on their cameras. One by one, the once-anonymous avatars transformed into real faces, each in their own domestic scene – lying on a couch, knitting at the table, cooking in the kitchen… My heart fluttered, and I found myself truly in a community.

Film for Mother 2024
8 March – 12 May 2024
Facebook Group: Caochangdi Workstation

Endnotes