In its opening sequence, filmmaker Nanfu Wang sets up the premise of Hooligan Sparrow.
“That’s me with the camera,” she says, a grainy image freezing on her face as she stands on the sidewalk outside a Chinese court. The footage moves on, surveying the street around her before settling on a group of men across the road. The group later approaches her and begins making threats.
Wang’s voiceover returns: “What follows is the story I captured before they took the camera from me.”
The next 80 minutes are a harrowing journey into the case of women’s rights activist Ye Haiyan, better known as Hooligan Sparrow. Over the course of a summer, journalist and filmmaker Wang follows the activist, who rose to internet fame for her work surrounding prostitution (Sparrow worked in a brothel to raise awareness of the conditions faced by local sex workers), as she is arrested, evicted from her home and tailed relentlessly by Chinese authorities.
When Wang first joins Sparrow, she is organizing a protest in Hainan, where the sexual abuse of six schoolgirls has made headlines but police have taken little action on the case. The protest, which later goes viral online, becomes the catalyst for Sparrow’s arrest as well as a series of run-ins with law enforcement, evictions and violent threats.
Video via Vimeo user Little Horse Crossing the River.
As a result of her work, Wang, too, becomes the target of this aggressive surveillance, documenting her own flight from Chinese authorities along with Sparrow’s. Through footage captured on smartphones, cameras and recording devices, often in secret, Wang highlights the severe consequences of speaking out against injustice as well as the grave danger faced by Sparrow.
While Sparrow and her family endure hardships throughout the film, a network of friends and supporters help to keep both her and her 13-year-old daughter safe. Wang eventually manages to smuggle her footage out of China, resulting in this documentary. However the most poignant interviews in the entire film come from the people affected by such injustices. Toward the end of the documentary, Wang sits down with the father of one of the Hainanese schoolgirls who was sexually abused. The man shows little emotion as he recounts the story of his daughter’s rape – how she was found unconscious in a hotel room, how the authorities investigated the teen girl overnight, how his wife informed him exactly what had happened – but the facts alone are heartbreaking.
Today, Sparrow continues to live in China, her passport revoked by the authorities, while Wang is in the United States, unsure of when she'll be able to safely return to her homeland.
“Police threatened my family and urged them to stop me from making my documentary,” she told Quartz. “I haven’t tried to go back to China yet. I don’t know if it’ll be safe to go.”
Hooligan Sparrow is streaming for free on PBS until Monday, October 31.
[Photo via Quartz]
