Hooli­gan Spar­row – first look review

Nan­fu Wang’s Hooli­gan Spar­row, which opens the New York edi­tion of the 2016 Human Rights Watch Film Fes­ti­val, tells of an atroc­i­ty car­ried out against the inno­cent by the pow­er­ful. The case involves a school prin­ci­pal and a gov­ern­ment offi­cial on China’s Hainan Island, who were accused of sex­u­al­ly assault­ing a six school girls between the ages of 11 and 14 in a hotel room. Over the course of the film we fol­low the activists ded­i­cat­ed to right­ing the wrong and ensur­ing it nev­er hap­pens again.

So far, so pre­dictably bleak. But there’s some­thing unusu­al in this fear-choked and sur­veil­lance-smoth­ered film, a dark­er men­ace hint­ing at a sys­temic moral cor­rup­tion that feels unsus­tain­able in the long, and even short, term. And that’s not sim­ply because the footage had to be smug­gled out of China.

Wang’s title comes from her sub­ject, Ye Haiyan, a Chi­nese fem­i­nist activist who has been throw­ing her body and voice into one cause after anoth­er in star­tling­ly brave ways. One of her most dar­ing exploits – par­tic­u­lar­ly so for such a sex­u­al­ly con­ser­v­a­tive soci­ety – ref­er­enced here con­cerned her mov­ing into a broth­el where she offered sex­u­al ser­vices for free. Her cam­paign gained instant noto­ri­ety, and is just one of many in which she brought atten­tion to the plight of both crim­i­nalised sex work­ers and the down­trod­den migrant labour­ers who fre­quent­ly hired them.

The direc­tor is one of sev­er­al qui­et and dili­gent women who form a kind of cell of staunch protest with Ye, a twin­kle-eyed type who shares a mis­chie­vous affect with Ai Wei­wei (who incor­po­rat­ed aspects of her strug­gle into an instal­la­tion shown at the end of the film). For many activists, the pri­ma­ry obsta­cle is sim­ply inac­tion, that all of their efforts will come to naught. But from the open­ing scenes of Hooli­gan Spar­row, it’s clear that speak­ing out has put every one of these women in real dan­ger. The seri­ous­ness of the sit­u­a­tion is high­light­ed by for-the-record tes­ti­monies in which the women declare that they did not com­mit suicide.

Although Hooli­gan Spar­row is a protest film at heart, it is also a fas­ci­nat­ing strat­e­gy and sur­vival doc­u­ment. We see Wang and the oth­er women hold­ing up signs and demand­ing that the prin­ci­pal be called to account. Par­tic­u­lar­ly shock­ing is a rev­e­la­tion that a legal loop­hole allows offi­cials charged with rape (a cap­i­tal offence in Chi­na) to receive less­er sen­tences by claim­ing that the women they are accused of assault­ing were pros­ti­tutes; even the sixth-grade girls in Hainan. But instead of apa­thy, the response to Ye’s protest, which goes viral while tak­ing place, is vio­lent and Kafkaesque. Ye is assault­ed in her home by a gang of thugs and then charged her­self with assault once the police final­ly appear.

The activists are sub­se­quent­ly forced to spend more of their time try­ing to stay one step ahead of the author­i­ties and their glow­er­ing squads of hired goons. This, of course, appears to fit right in with the insti­tu­tion­al las­si­tude of the offi­cials encoun­tered here, who are more inter­est­ed in threat­en­ing Wang and tak­ing away her cam­era rather than doing any­thing about what the women are protest­ing. The cyn­i­cal bar­barism of the author­i­ties por­trayed in Hooli­gan Spar­row is so deeply entrenched that they appar­ent­ly regard the dis­cov­ery of a hid­den cam­era in Wang’s glass­es as more out­ra­geous than the sex­u­al vio­lence she report­ing on.

The out­rage in Hainan almost cer­tain­ly won’t be enough to result in insti­tu­tion­al reform. Mod­ern-day Chi­na is too mired in insti­tu­tion­al myopia and author­i­tar­i­an lock­step to change that quick­ly. But it could be just one more har­bin­ger of an impend­ing break that may not be vol­un­tary. It’s worth not­ing that in 2015 alone there were over 2,700 labor strikes and protests around the coun­try – over one per day in south­ern Guang­dong province, where most of Hooli­gan Spar­row takes place. That wave of dis­con­tent doesn’t even take into account the var­i­ous protests against every­thing from col­laps­ing schools to sex­u­al assault, which are so expert­ly detailed in Wang’s film. This will most like­ly end up being against Beijing’s long-term inter­ests. The cas­es brought to light by Ye, via Wang’s gut­sy film­mak­ing, could be the spar­rows in the coal mine. The rage that spurred them on isn’t going away.

The Human Rights Watch Film Fes­ti­val runs in New York from June 10 to 19. For more info vis­it ff​.hrw​.org/​n​e​w​-york