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XIXI

By Fan WU

SVEMIRKO FILM PRODUCTIONS - as PROD / FIN

First film - Production 2022

In my last summer in Europe after studies, I befriended XiXi, a Chinese improvisation artist. For a time, we were free from the ideologies we grew up in. Through years of video diary exchanges, our friendship that was a window to freedom, evolved into a room where what was silenced found its voice.

- Year of production
- 2022
- Genres
- First film, Documentary
- Countries
- TAIWAN, PHILIPPINES, GERMANY
- Languages
- MANDARIN (TRADITIONAL), MANDARIN, FRENCH, ENGLISH
- Budget
- 0 - 0.3 M$
- Duration
- 90 mn
- Director(s)
- Fan WU
- Writer(s)
- Fan WU
- Cast
- Xi XI
- Producer(s)
- Fan WU (Svemirko Film Productions), Venice ATIENZA (Svemirko Film Productions), Alex TONDOWSKI (TONDOWSKI FILMS)
- Synopsis
- XiXi is a film about womanhood, autonomy and self-reinvention, told through the evolution of friendship between my friend XiXi and me.
  
  Six years ago, I moved to Europe to study cinema. That was my first time being far away from my protective family and confronted with different cultures and mentalities. It was also the first time that I realised that there was another kind of woman inside me who waits to be emancipated. Ironically, I had never doubted that when my visa ended, I would return to Taiwan and resume my good girl’s persona.
  
  However, during my last summer in Europe, I encountered XiXi in Berlin.
  
  She is an improvisation artist from China who is critical towards all the rules and expectations from the society. She travels around Europe by hitchhiking and lives in a squat in the outskirts of Berlin.I feel she is the externalised version of my inner longing for freedom.
  
  By the end of the autumn, XiXi returned to France to stay closer with her 6-year-old daughter Nina. I returned to Taiwan to be with my parents and started to work everyday from 10 to 6. Every evening on the train going home, I think of XiXi and our time of being carefree in Berlin.
  
  We continue our correspondence. As I know everything about her, she calls me when she struggles with life. And her diaries that she sent to me over the years have become my window to the unconventional life that I didn’t dare to have.
  
  By following her life closely, I realize that after being a housewife in the first 5 years of her marriage, and insisting on living an alternative life, XiXi is in a very fragile economic situation.Therefore she is constantly homeless and does not have financial independence. Having no stable income and residency make it very difficult to prove her motherhood for her daughter Nina during her divorce and visa application process.
  
  At this tricky moments, XiXi’s father commanded her to go back to China for Chinese New year of 2019, to explain to him why she failed her perfect marriage in France, and why she lost Nina’s custody. XiXi obeyed and I joined her trip.
  
  It is during this trip, that XiXi reveals to me the sexual trauma she had witnessed from her father, and how her mother Peach-Blossom left the marriage and abandoned her in order to pursue her own artist dream.
  
  XiXi struggles to reconcile with Peach-Blossom. In front of both of us, her mother makes a prediction that XiXi is doomed to copy her destiny. Upon returning to France, XiXi is determined to not repeat her mother’s history.
  
  Through the video diaries and friendship, the film explores womanhood through generations and different cultures worldwide, and the challenges of making one’s own path.