Self-Portrait with Three Women
Director: Zhang Mengqi
Language: Chinese with English subtitles
Year: 2010
Length: 70 minutes

Part of a new generation of documentary filmmakers from China, a young woman weaves together memory, oral history and performance in a poetic and fierce style.

“This year I turned 23. This film began with my own search, then delving into my mother and her mother, where blood has flowed through three generations. As a victim of an oppressive marriage, my grandmother held hopes for my mother to enter a perfect marriage. When my mother became a victim herself, she turned those hopes to me. Marriage may be every girl’s dream, but it is also the murderer of those dreams.” – Mengqi

James Tweedie, associate professor of Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies at the University of Washington, introduced the film. Following the screening, a panel discussion with UW scholars featured Shuxuan Zhou (GWSS PhD student) and Kathy Morrow (Comparative Literature PhD student).

Graduate students decided to produce a short film that explains why this change in name is significant and what it means to the study of women, gender, and sexuality.

Film credits:

Filmed by Monica De La Torre, Martha Gonzalez, Kate Mottola, Nicole Robert, Noralis Rodríguez-Coss, and Shuxuan Zhou.

Edited by Monica De La Torre, Noralis Rodríguez-Coss, and Shuxuan Zhou.

Music by Quetzal

Please note that this video was filmed and produced prior to faculty and staff changes. For more information please visit the GWSS Department website.

Check out the trailer for the Home Alive Documentary, directed by UW undergraduates Leah Michaels and Rozz Therrien and produced by Evangeline Spracklin!

Through an indie-rock class offered at the University of Washington in Seattle, two seniors, Leah Michaels and Rozz Therrien, were exposed to a grassroots, self-defense organization called Home Alive. The organization was founded by nine women in response to the brutal rape and murderer of Mia Zapata, lead singer of the influential punk band of the early 90s, The Gits. Home Alive began in 1993 and experienced many changes: from becoming a non-profit to gaining international attention with a CD, and finally relinquishing their non-profit status in 2010.

The documentary is focused around community response to tragedy using the Do It Yourself ethos to try to make a difference. The documentary partially focuses on the difficulties of working as a collective, the limitations of a non-profit status, and the ever-present funding issues. As in any collective and organization there are varying conceptions and outlooks on the directions it will take. Our interviews capture the differing stories over the organization’s 17-year history. In doing so we have discovered the changing idea of what community means as well as what DIY means today. We explore the pivotal role community, specifically the Seattle Art and Music Scene has influenced an organization that developed out of community response. We are using juxtaposing views to creatively attempt to piece together a documentary and show what the life and possible death of an organization means to a community. We hope that you find this story worth telling just as we do!

Photos by Angelica Macklin

This film documents the history and creation of the Women of Color Collective at the University of Washington through interviews with members from the collective, as well as faculty advisers who were instrumental in building the collective. The Women of Color Collective and this film project employ creative interventions of visibility, resistance, and community-building required to survive and thrive within academic settings.