Jinyan Zeng

On the position of filmmaker as feminist, this article aims to investigate the documentarian’s strategies of dealing with the cruelty in activism and the cruelty suffered by women in Chinese context. I will firstly analyse the protagonists’ shock from We the Workers (2017), which shows the tension between activism logic and cinematic representation of activist. This tension was eased by recognising protagonists’ emotionalised reflexivity. Then I will analyse the production and distribution processes of Outcry and Whisper (2020) and compare the text of its three editions. I will examine how filmmakers negotiate with intersectional suppressed powers, creativity collaborators, NGO sponsors and protagonists in representing violence, activism and women. The power tensions among documentary participants—filmmaker, protagonist, sponsor, or multiple identity holders—will illustrate how exile, activist and transnational feminist values have reshaped Chinese independent documentary authorship, filmmaking process and representation strategies, and the social-political space explored by documentaries. I attempt to promote concern for activist protagonists and cinematic experience of healing to reconstruct feminist humanity, rather than the de-gendered and/or de-humanised political activism or de-politicised feminism in documentary films, as the strategy of dealing with violence encountered in the cruelty of activism and women in a suppressed political context.