HOOLIGAN SPARROW
(Nanfu Wang, 2016, China/USA, 84 minutes)
At times, Nanfu Wang's vertiginous documentary, Hooligan Sparrow, feels like a spy thriller as she does her best to keep up with Chinese women's rights activist Ye Haiyun, code name Sparrow, her unstoppable subject.
There are clashes with police, government stooges, and other antagonists who aim to curtail Sparrow's activism and to force Wang to stop filming.
Instead of opinion editorials and other conventional forms of communication, Sparrow engages in high-risk activities in a country infamously adverse to free speech. Aside from videos, protests, and photo projects--some featuring art world star Ai Weiwei--she once offered her services to migrant laborers for free in order to publicize the plight of sex workers.
Wang, who lives in New York, returns to her native China to document Sparrow's work. She swiftly finds that national security agents are monitoring her actions, simply because she's walking around with a video camera, so she switches to concealed micro-cameras.
When they meet for the first time, Sparrow and her sister activists are organizing a protest against a Hainan Province principal who coerced six underage girls into prostitution.
Sparrow's attorney, Wang Yu, notes that China's protection laws for women and children are not strictly enforced. Furthermore, there's a loophole in the child prostitution law that allows government officials to skate free (the principal explains that the 11 to 14-year old girls were intended as "gifts").
Wang continues to document the outcome of their action. Though they garner messages of support across the social media sphere, Sparrow suffers beatings, arrest, detention, raids, and death threats. A group of men, presumably paid government thugs, even holds up a banner outside her apartment building that reads, "Sparrow, you whore, get out of the city."
The police, who seem to see her as a nuisance, do little to help, despite the fact that her 13-year-old daughter could also really use their protection.
The situation becomes even more fraught when Sparrow's apartment manager kicks her out, and no other building will take her, even as she travels to two other provinces to secure housing. At the same time, the police are questioning everyone who knows the filmmaker. Sparrow copes by depending on the kindness of family members, while Wang evades detection by avoiding hotels stays, train travel, and all other transactions that require identification.
If Wang never gets to the bottom of the reasons why Sparrow has decided to risk her life for a cause--other than the fact that Chinese women can only benefit from her advocacy--it doesn't weaken her film in any way.
Instead, she provides a you-are-there look at the risks one Chinese activist faces on a daily basis. Though the hazards can be disheartening, it's hard not to notice that she's rarely alone. From her daughter and boyfriend to her friends and associates, Sparrow is never completely isolated. Whether that will be enough in the years to come is an open question, but she's launched a movement that can only gather strength with time.
Images from Austin Film Society (Sparrow alone and with associates) and Doc NYC (Nanfu Wang). Hooligan Sparrow is available on DVD from Kino Lorber and on VOD from Amazon, Apple TV, and other digital platforms.
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