Beyond the Frame: Women’s Transformative Practice in Contemporary Chinese Documentary

Through textual analysis, practitioner interviews, archival research, and participant observation, it studies filmmakers including Wang Nanfu, Zhang Mengqi, He Xiaopei, and Zhu Lingyu, alongside women-led initiatives such as Mother Filming Workshops, FamilyLens, and Jilu Commune.

It argues that these practices rework independence and publicness through negotiation, intimacy, memory, and infrastructure. By making women’s experiences and suppressed histories visible, they create fragile yet persistent forms of feminist intervention, even when public recognition and stable institutions remain limited.