“Hooligan Sparrow” director Nanfu Wang was awarded with IDA’s Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award at a ceremony held last Friday. This week she had some worrying updates to offer about her film’s subject, Ye Haiyan, and other human rights activists featured in the doc.
“Since the film was shortlisted for an Oscar a few days ago,” she said in a statement, “Ye Haiyan (Sparrow) has been visited by police three times. My family was told to warn me not to say anything negative about China in public, and that they’re monitoring what I say. It all sounds too absurd to be true. But I realize now that they’re afraid. They’re afraid that the world will see a reality about China that they fight to hide. They’re afraid the world will pay attention when they arrest people who fight for their rights — four of whom were in this film and are still in prison today. They want me to be afraid too. But this is why I make documentaries. When enough people see the reality of injustice, they refuse to tolerate it. The support of communities makes it possible to share these realities with the world.”
Wang shared that she would be devoting more efforts to freeing another one of the activists she filmed, rights lawyer Wang Yu, who she says has been “held for a year without any charges and then charged with trumped-up nonsense and forced to make a video ‘confession.’”
“Hooligan Sparrow” tells the shocking story of the fight for human rights in China from its front lines. When two Chinese government officials who sexually abused six schoolgirls are poised to receive light sentences, famed women’s rights advocate Ye Haiyan [who is known more widely by her nickname, Hooligan Sparrow, in China] leads a group of activists in a protest. Sparrow is subsequently arrested, evicted from her home, and chased from town to town by violent mobs. But the government is unable to control the ensuing social-media backlash, and Sparrow’s protest goes viral.
The most harrowing part of the filmmaking process, Wang told Women and Hollywood, was getting the footage out of China.
“Because we were constantly on the run, I couldn’t leave my hard drives anywhere. I carried all of my footage with me everywhere I went. I was always afraid that my footage would be seized and destroyed, or that it would be seen by the authorities and used against my subjects. At one point, I tried to ship a drive to the U.S., but I realized I was followed on the way to the shipping office, and I was afraid that my drive would be taken. I rushed back to the office and retrieved my drive. Luckily, I had a few friends who were traveling to the U.S. who were willing to bring the drive back in person.”
“Hooligan Sparrow” has been nominated for the Independent Spirit Awards, the Cinema Eye Honors, and the Critics Choice Documentary Awards. It is on the shortlist to be nominated for the Academy Awards.
