“Outside the Room of My Own,” a debut feature from Chinese filmmaker Yan Siyu starring Lucie Zhang, is showing a work-in-progress cut at SIFF Project during the Shanghai International Film Festival.
The film follows Yuan Chengge, a writer burned out by life in Beijing, as she travels to Chengdu and then onward to the village of Luding with her mother and grandmother. The journey draws three generations of women together across contrasting urban landscapes – Beijing as megacity, Chengdu as major urban center, Luding as small town – against a backdrop of social and economic uncertainty.
Inspired by Virginia Woolf‘s “A Room of One’s Own,” the film revisits the “independent woman” narrative in contemporary China. “The central question of this film is not how a woman can become ‘independent,’ but how I can reshape my subjectivity through my relationships with others,” Yan says. She adds that the film tries to approach the multiplicity and complexity of Chinese women’s lived experience “in a non-binary way,” placing the life experiences of daughter, mother, and grandmother side by side.
Yan, who was born in Chengdu and trained at Beijing Film Academy after an undergraduate stint at Denison University in the U.S., traces the project’s origins to a period of personal reckoning. “‘Outside the Room of My Own’ is filled with my confusion and reflections on gender, generations, and individual existence in contemporary Chinese society,” she says. “It is also the first step I have taken as a filmmaker in trying to build an aesthetic system of my own – and it is the first step I cherish the most.”
