Engagement Paper for Hybrid Format Film Meat

Abstract

After having suffered the pressure of being a single woman at the age of twenty-five when I was in China, I have made a hybrid format short film Meat to remember my personal experience as being a sheng nu (left-over woman). This engagement paper puts Meat into a theoretical, historical, and personal context. Through the personal-experience-based story, a sheng nu’s relationship with the society and her family will be explored, in an attempt to analyze the social, historical and political problems, faced by single Chinese women during this decade. The paper will also discuss how the creative choices behind the shooting, locations, actors, languages, props, and new technologies, combined with hybrid filmmaking, which includes animation, realist live-action and symbolic live-action, are used to build a complex portrait of young Chinese women today.