Filming the Unspoken: Women Reflecting on Marriage, Body, and Freedom

In this collaborative project, my friend and I co-created two video works — an art film and a documentary.
The documentary unfolds through five guiding questions, exploring how women from different cultural and generational backgrounds understand marriage, gender roles, and freedom.

These five questions correspond to five symbolic stages in the life journey of the self-combing women (zishunü, women in early 20th-century China who vowed to remain unmarried and independent):

1. Have you ever been pressured by your family or society to get married? What was that like?
2. What does marriage mean to you, personally?
3. Were you ever expected to embody a certain idea of femininity — in how you should walk, sit, or stand, or in the roles you were expected to take on as a woman?
4. When was the first time you felt like your body didn’t fully belong to you?
5. How do you define freedom or agency in your life?

Each question is linked to a corresponding scene and ritual of the self-combing women:

• The Combing Ritual: an older self-combing woman combs the hair of a younger woman who is about to take the vow — symbolizing her choice to remain unmarried and independent for life.
• The Wedding Ceremony: in history, self-combing women held a symbolic “wedding” ritual to declare their lifelong celibacy; before this, they would wrap themselves in white cloth to signify purity.
• The Chains Scene: the self-combing woman interacts physically with iron chains. The chains symbolize both the constraints of social institutions and gender norms, and the internal struggles and resistance of the self.
• The Black Veil in a British Church: a contemporary self-combing woman wears a black veil inside a foreign church, symbolizing an identity that transcends time, culture, and geography — and the solitude it entails.
• Cutting the Red Thread: representing the final moment of liberation — breaking free from societal expectations and reclaiming autonomy.

In the documentary, these five questions are answered by participants from diverse cultural, generational, and personal backgrounds — some from Eastern societies, others living in the West; some single, some married, others choosing solitude.
We invited each participant to respond freely to one of the questions on camera while interacting with the installation:
some touched the red thread, some grasped the chains, some wore the black veil —
these embodied gestures bring abstract reflection back into sensory experience, allowing personal memories and the symbolic meanings of the installation to resonate with each other.

This structure of “response – interaction – reflection” turns the film from mere documentation into a live process of thinking.
Through tactile engagement, each participant re-experiences the boundaries and weight of being “female.”

Through this collaborative video project, we aimed to create a shared space where women across cultures, generations, and identities could speak, remember, and redefine the meaning of autonomy.
Every answer, every silence, and every gesture became part of a collective tapestry of memory.
These moving images are not only about marriage or gender —
they are about how women, within layers of constraint, continue to seek control over self, body, and destiny.

This is not only a filmic collaboration,
but also a dialogue among women —
in front of the camera, we look back together, and together, we begin to rewrite.