02: All About My Sisters
On Wang Qiong’s All About My Sisters (2021), and on asking tough questions that have no easy answers.
“Many women went through this, I am not alone.”
“Why are you filming all of this?” asks Jin, frowning at the camera at the start of Wang Qiong’s All About My Sisters (2021). It is a bold way to open a film, not just because the tone in which the question is posed is sharp and accusatory, but because its inclusion exposes the exploratory phase in the process of making a film like this. The footage being recorded here is not yet a section of a story, but instead just a way of seeing whether there is a film to be made. The scene is tentative and tetchy, and in this moment Jin appears irritated at her sister, looking away from the handheld camera that Qiong is invasively zooming closer and closer into her face. “I am wondering what you went through when you were little,” Qiong replies. “Well, I went through all sorts of stuff,” says Jin, uneasy at the prospect of expressing memories that are still too real and raw to be transformed into words. At this stage of proceedings, neither filmmaker nor subject are comfortable with the weight of the questions they are working towards, nor really sure that what they might unearth is yet ready to be said. For now, all Qiong can do is film and listen, and create a space through which Jin can be heard.
Shortly after this exchange, Qiong tells Jin that her intention with this film-to-be is to “pursue a birth story.” In following this path, Qiong tells the story of her sister’s birth, but also speaks to the stories of the many girls who were born during the height of China’s one-child policy—where a tradition of sex-based discrimination collided with a programme that sought to aggressively regulate population growth, resulting in countless unwanted baby girls being abandoned at birth or terminated at a very late stage of the pregnancy. As a text card included in the film explains, China’s one-child policy—which was often more of a ‘two-child policy’ in effect, especially in rural areas and in instances where the firstborn child in a family was female—was introduced in 1982 but “enacted mainly between 1990 and 2000.” Qiong was born in 1992. Her older sister, Li, was born in 1990. Jin, her younger sister, was born in 1994. Whilst Qiong and Li were able to grow up under their parent’s care, as the third-born girl in the family, Jin was treated differently. After surviving an abortive injection intended to kill her just prior to her birth, Jin was left in an orchard near to the family home. Having survived for several days in squalid conditions, Jin was eventually collected by her aunt and uncle, who raised her instead. By interrogating the uncomfortable details of how one family treated their own child, Qiong is able to comment on a national situation that remains greatly under-discussed, but which has currents that run through to the modern day, despite the policy officially ending in 2015. Jin’s birth story may be unpleasant, but as the film stresses all the way through its duration, it is not unique.
Despite this separation at birth, all three sisters remained in close contact, forging a complex, conflicted relationship that, as the film explores, has always been shadowed by the split paths their lives took. Running three-hours in length, All About My Sisters is an ambitious, emotionally intense attempt to understand the lasting impacts of this policy, looking at what it means to grow up as a daughter within a family that rejected their child and now has to reckon with the lingering effects of that decision. The film explores the shifting relationship between these three women, but also uses it as a means of exploring the wider context and attempting to answer a number of complex, near-unanswerable questions. How can a set of societal conditions and cultural expectations create a situation where baby boys are so greatly preferred that girls are habitually terminated or abandoned at birth? How can an ordinary family live with the shame of having committed such an atrocious act, and can they somehow still learn to care for each other after having cast off one of their own? Will this experience always be something that shapes Jin’s life, or can she learn to look past an atrocity that has shaped her understanding of the world she lives in?
To try to find the answers, Qiong uses a number of strategies. Firstly, as seen in that opening scene, she speaks with her sisters and learns about their lives and their beliefs. Jin now has her own son and a husband, but her past experiences seem to colour her relationship with them. Li is also now married. Pregnant with her second child, she fears that the baby may not be a boy and that her husband will be disappointed. Secondly, Qiong also films her family members diaristically, trailing them around their homes and in the workplace, and watching as they interact with other family members or squabble with each other. In all of this, Qiong looks at how the initial separation has created fissures that periodically explode during moments of particular interfamilial tension. She also explores how the prejudices and expectations expressed by her parents persist through the generations, and how trauma also spreads and resurfaces along the same lines. Thirdly, interspersed through all of this spontaneous material is a series of more formalised interviews. Filmed with a tripod and with the subjects sitting in front of a set background, in these Qiong asks firm questions directly to the elder members of the family, giving them a reason to process the past and a space to try to explain how this awful event occurred despite them all being fundamentally reasonable people. These interviews are necessarily confrontational and Qiong receives some resistance to her film, which, as well as a personal documentary and a feminist project, could also be described as a longitudinal performance that involves a filmed familial invention. “Didn’t your mother tell you already?” Qiong’s father says, attempting to avoid answering Qiong’s questions about the true nature of Jin’s abandonment and subsequent adoption. “She did, but I want to hear you say it.” replies Qiong, knowing that if anything resembling healing is to take place, some level of transparency is first necessary.
To their credit, Qiong’s parents are brave in their willingness to admit guilt and to address their actions on camera, but this is something that takes real time and requires remarkable dedication. In forcing her parents to talk openly about the past, Qiong encourages rare reflection on a situation about which there is a widespread reluctance to honestly remember. This frankness is important, as while the one-child policy may now be over in China, its effects linger and prejudice remains persistent. Just as her mother had tried to terminate Jin, Li insists she will abort her child should it turn out to be a daughter. In twenty five years, many things change but some also stay the same. Across all of this material—which was collected over a five year filming period, and which seems to be presented not in chronological order but instead into a carefully workshopped narrative order that condenses time to create a cross-section of the multiple interconnected families and their shifting, contested relations—Qiong is exploring much more than she may have first imagined she would be when she took hold of her camera and asked her sister to talk to her about what she went through when she was little. Out of 300 hours of footage and through a lengthy editing process, a slippery, multifaceted story emerges that weaves together a knotty web of fraught family dynamics, shows people as morally complex and emotionally conflicted, and pushes difficult ideas about family and society. “No one is innocent in this matter,” says Jin, a woman who, despite being tangibly scarred by her situation, still comes off as brave, strong, and forthright. All of the easy answers are avoided in All About My Sisters, and ultimately, no one is absolved of responsibility for their actions.
Wang Qiong’s All About My Sisters (2021) screened recently in the Bright Future competition at IFFR 2021. It was also recommended to me by Karin Chien, and will be released soon in Canada and the USA by dGenerate films. More information about Wang Qiong and her other work can be found here. To receive more articles like this, do subscribe to nonlinearities. The writing in this newsletter will always be free-to-read, but donations are very welcome.