The Projector | China’s marginalised live streamers are the stars of a new documentary
- Filmmaker Zhu Shengze’s Present.Perfect shines a spotlight on China’s everyday live streamers
- Many of them are just searching for a human connection
China’s live-streaming industry – made up of mostly young women hosting online shows from their well-appointed homes (or studios) for hours on end – is expected to soar in value to 87.3 billion yuan (US$12.9 billion) this year.
But in Present.Perfect, Zhu Shengze’s latest documentary, which premiered on January 27 at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, the Wuhan-born, United States-based filmmaker shifts the focus from the internet’s rich and beautiful to its ordinary people. Zhu’s live streamers – from farmers and labourers to sweatshop workers and the disabled – film themselves at home or work responding to questions from real-time viewers.
Present.Perfect is drawn from nearly 800 hours of footage that Zhu recorded from mainland live-streaming websites. Zhu says most of her subjects have “only 100 or even fewer” subscribers.
“Most of them are starting dead-end jobs or have disabilities,” she says over Skype from Chicago, where she has lived since she finished a master’s degree in film, video and new media at the city’s esteemed Art Institute, in 2017. “It’s difficult for them to find a place in real life. The internet and live streaming is the place where they can be themselves and get connected with like-minded people.”
Zhu admits she was initially attracted by the more popular clips to be found on live-streaming platforms, of which there are about 100 in the mainland today.
“At first I was intrigued by the weird, bizarre and extreme activities in live-streaming shows, like people eating worms, or dancing naked on a frozen lake, or using their hands to smash rocks,” she says. “After a month or two, however, I lost interest, because the tricks they use, the songs they play or the jokes they tell are all similar. I realise now what’s more interesting is the instant interaction between the host and the audience. It’s a social experience. Many hosts don’t care how many fans they have or how much money they earn by showing people their lives.”