Short Film Program: Xiaopei’s Camera

The Lucky One
He Xiaopei, China 2011, 36 min. OV with english subtitles

Gay Cats
He Xiaopei, China 2010, 3 min. OV with english subtitles

Our Marriages – When Lesbians Marry Gay Men
He Xiaopei, China 2013, 42 min. OV with english subtitles

Happily Ever After
He Xiaopei, China 2019, 37 min. OV with english subtitles

In this two-hour session you can witness the diversity of He Xiaopei’s filmmaking. The Lucky One is about a HIV-positive Chinese woman, who, confronted with dying, reveals her hidden desires. Gay Cats, a love story about two male cats, went viral on YouTube with over 500,000 hits. Our Marriages – When Lesbians Marry Gay Men and its sequel Happily Ever After follow the life stories of four Chinese lesbians who seek contract marriages with gay men in North Eastern China. In Our Marriages you can see the director’s ironic observation about weddings and married life, while Happily Ever After shows the protagonists’ same sex partners, their gay husbands, their parents, as well as their parents in law. These formations invite the viewer to reflect upon mainstream ideas of what makes a family. (PF)

He Xiaopei is an indie film director and the executive director of Pink Space, a NGO focusing on films representing invisibilized desires and lives. From the 1990s, she devoted herself to the feminist and lesbian movement in China. She studied sexuality and cultural studies in the UK, graduating with a PhD.

Popo Fan is a Berlin-based Chinese diaspora filmmaker, curator and writer. His films include queer activism documentaries and scripted, sex-positive shorts. For more than a decade, he has organized the Beijing Queer Film Festival and founded the Queer University Video Training Camp in China.