All About My Sisters – Shelly Kraicer

Wang Qiong (or June Wang, as she calls herself for English speakers) is an extraordinary young Chinese independent filmmaker. Extraordinary for many reasons: she’s fiercely independent and has made a film outside the Chinese censorship regime, on a topic that doesn’t avoid controversy.

Wang Qiong is extremely courageous. Her first feature is an intimate, at times searing, occasionally confrontational, often funny, sometimes painfully, vividly honest portrait of her own parents, step-parents, and sisters − and the complex emotional relationships that make their lives exceptional. And she doesn’t shy away from putting herself right into this intensely private family portrait.

And Wang Qiong is admirably ambitious: starting out from a small town in rural China, she first joined IFChina, the collective ‘citizen participatory media project’ founded by one of China’s independent film pioneers, Jian Yi. She then moved to the USA, where she is now studying at Temple University in Philadelphia and working on her second and third documentary film projects. But we can see that she is already a prodigiously talented filmmaker, able to combine the intimacy of one-to-one family portraiture with an overarching vision of female empowerment projected against the historical background of China’s changing social policies.

Written by Shelly Kraicer