We Are Here

After the screening talk with Shi Tou

What would happen if, back in 1995, three hundred Lala (拉拉, meaning “lesbian” in Chinese) had come to the UN conference hosted in Beijing? What would happen if two buses loaded with them headed to an underground club in the city center of Beijing? Well, this is how the flame of China’s lesbian movement was ignited. We Are Here, made by Chinese lesbian activists, interviews the attendees of the United Nations’ “Fourth World Conference on Women” in 1995 in Beijing. Via their candid, hilarious narration, we witness a brief history of the Chinese lesbian movement starting with the “secret correspondence network of LaLa” and “eight Chinese Lala as a national movement”.

Zhao Jing赵静 （also “Sam 三木”） has been a pioneering LGBT activist in China since 2005. She is the co-founder and chief editor of les+, the most influential lesbian print magazine in mainland China, with readers across all provinces as well as many other countries. In 2014, she graduated from New York University School of the Arts and directed the documentary We Are Here, which was invited to several international film festivals and screened in more than 10 cities in China. In 2015, she founded Yummy with the aim to provide Chinese people with professional and positive sex education. 

Shi Tou 石头 has been an artist and a lesbian activist since the 1990s. She is China’s first lesbian activist celebrity: In 2000 she starred in the country’s first lesbian film, Fish and Elephant, which received the Elvira Notari Prize at Venice Film Festival in 2001 and the Best Asian Film at Forum of New Cinema of the Berlinale in 2022. Her paintings and photographs have been shown in Rotterdam, Chicago, Shanghai, Nanjing and Shenzhen.