Upcoming series / collection of short films focusing on trans stories from Mainland China.
Friction: A Series
NO.1
Friction (2024)
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)
NO.2
Friction: W (2025)
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.)
NO.3
upcoming…
Friction: 12 interviews (2025)
30-40 mins
short documentary
The film plans to interview around 12 transgender social workers, individuals, and activists in a certain city in China. The social workers are normally themselves trans individuals too, who are responsible for charity interventionist works for trans lives in crisis, i.e. providing resources and advice when dealing with abusive family, offering support and counselling sessions, informing about the pathways to transition, etc. While other parts of the community try to do their part, support each other, create collective care, grow, keep everyone safe, and find a way forward. The film is looking into this layered and complex environment, where tragedies are constantly happening in silence, people’s emotional capability and strengths are forced to be pushed to the limit, all for the hope of a brighter future.
The film will employ a similar approach to the previous ones; however, the stories will be collected in an interview or audio recording manner.
There will not be any footage or filming done in this stage to protect the safety of the contributors in the best way possible.
The stories will be reconstructed through either animation, abstract re-enactment, AI-generated or modified imageries, or a hybrid of all, where the interview will lead the story while the visuals explore innovative ways to tell the stories truthfully without putting contributors in danger.