Present.Perfect.

China’s live-stream­ing indus­try is boom­ing. Expect­ed to gen­er­ate 75 bil­lion yuan (approx £8bn) by the end of 2019, the live-stream­ing mar­ket is home to stream­ers spe­cial­is­ing in just about every sub­ject imag­in­able, and while some earn mil­lions broad­cast­ing their lives online, oth­ers do it just for fun.

Shengze Zhu’s Present.Perfect., made entire­ly from online broad­casts, skews more towards the mar­gin­al side of this off-kil­ter indus­try. Rather than cen­tring on celebri­ties, it fea­tures footage cap­tured from the chan­nels of var­i­ous odd­balls, cut­ting cycli­cal­ly between footage from the broad­casts of 12 dif­fer­ent ​‘anchors’ with small­er audi­ences, draw­ing from 800 hours of raw recordings.

The director’s choice of sub­ject (includ­ing a man with dis­fig­ure­ments who streams while work­ing as a street artist, and a 30-year-old with a high-pitched voice and child­like appear­ance due to a con­di­tion that has pre­vent­ed him from ever reach­ing sex­u­al matu­ri­ty) high­lights the voyeurism that is inher­ent to this mode of view­er­ship. Accord­ing­ly, she includes aspects of the industry’s more unpleas­ant ele­ments: stream­ers being berat­ed in their cha­t­rooms, or seen express­ing frus­tra­tion at their iso­la­tion in the real world.

Despite this, it doesn’t feel exploita­tive, as the idea that every­one has made a choice to share (and, in a way, sell) their sto­ry feels odd­ly empow­er­ing, espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing China’s strin­gent cen­sor­ship of the internet.

Sev­er­al stream­ers who broad­cast from the work­place embody a mod­ern style of entre­pre­neuri­al­ism. A farmer films him­self sow­ing seeds, brand­ing it as ​‘agri­tain­ment’ for detached urban elites. One woman in a fac­to­ry chats with her ​‘show­room’ while stitch­ing togeth­er under­wear, col­lect­ing tips from the side-hus­tle to sup­ple­ment her pay.

Zhu dis­plays an apti­tude for using intense, obses­sive obser­va­tion of the ordi­nary to expose the socioe­co­nom­ic real­i­ties of con­tem­po­rary China.