Upcoming short documentary focusing on trans community stories from Mainland China.
Friction: 8 Interviews
UPCOMING…
Friction: 8 Interviews (2025)
40 mins
experimental short documentary
KEY INFO:
Eight voices. One hidden city. Friction takes you inside China’s underground network of trans social workers—stories of survival, care, and quiet defiance, told through sound and haunting, abstract visuals.
The 30–40 minute documentary pulling you deep inside a hidden network of transgender social workers, activists, and individuals in one Chinese city. These are people on the frontlines—helping others escape abusive homes, offering counselling, and guiding medical and social transitions, often with no official support and minimal training. Told entirely through eight intimate audio testimonies, the film unfolds like a slow-burn investigation. We begin with raw, personal stories of trauma, family abuse, and mental health struggles—an unflinching entry point into trans life. From there, we move into the community itself: a place that is, in many ways, a wound trying to heal.
Here, resilience is tested daily, tragedies happen in silence, and the fight to survive never stops. In the third act, the lens widens—taking us into the shadows of conversion therapies, social violence, and state repression, through the voices of two anonymous activists. Finally, veteran organisers and NGO workers close the film with a stark, urgent reflection on what it means to be trans in China in 2025.
No contributor is filmed directly; their safety comes first. Instead, each story is visually reconstructed through abstract re-enactments and AI-generated imagery, creating a world that feels both intimate and untouchable—real yet impossible to pin down
AI experimental scene re-enactment samples:
Background:
Friction (2024), Existing Work
21 mins
short documentary
Featuring a deeply closeted trans woman in her 30s living in Beijing, who struggles with coming out to her family, thus living a rather secretive double life. While only close friends or trusted co-workers know her real self, and she is able to live a relatively good life, the societal pressure and gender regulatory cultural nuances makes hiding and suppressing herself seem absolutely necessary.
Employing AI imagery modification to conceal her identity and ensure her safety, also using experimental sequences featuring mannequins to explore the problematics of body conceptualisation and the trans segregation that follows.
(Currently on the festival circuit)
Friction: W (2025), Existing Work
20 mins
short documentary
This film features a trans girl in south China, who has broken up with her family due to her coming out as transgender woman. She has been dealing with the emotional strains and fallouts of her family’s radical opposition for years. In the meantime, she has found a group of queer friends circle as her ‘chosen family’, and gained degrees of mutual love supports from the community. She works as a freelancer while trying to save up for the Gender Reassignment Surgery, hoping to live in a more legitimised and liveable way in China where the gender binary and segregation of trans identities are deeply ingrained in the cultural and social aspects of life.
Employing AI imagery modification to conceal her identity and ensure her safety.
(Currently not able to showcase publicly for safety reasons, in the meantime, arrangements with NGOs and other communities are being made to screen the film in community led safe spaces.)