Selected filmography: Self-Portrait: Fairy Tale in 47KM (2021), Self-Portrait: Window in 47KM (2019), Zi Hua Xiang: 47 Gong Li Si Fen Ke Si (2018), Self-Portrait: Sphinx in 47KM (2017), Self-Portrait: Dreaming at 47KM (2013), Self Portrait: At 47KM (2012), Self-Portrait With Three Women (2011).
Spanish premiere
What is in a self-portrait? For the last ten years, Mengqi Zhang, the young dancer, choreographer and filmmaker from China, has been shooting films that embody this idea in their names. Nine of the ten films that she has made were shot in the village that is home to her father and grandfather, "KM 47", a place to which she returns each winter. Her self-portraits seek the answers to all her questions in others. Her films have focussed on her mother, grandmother, elderly inhabitants of the village and their recollections of the great famine of 59, on death, birth, children and their desires. Her idea of identity is progressively traced between memory (geographical, historical and family) and her specific acts, something she brings with her to the village each winter and which after such a long time has started to change the landscape (knowledge of the cinema, dance, a public library and a monument to those who died during the famine, among other things). In Self-portrait: Fairy Tale in 47KM Mengqi wants to build a house on a hill, a cultural place to dance, read, draw and make films. She is accompanied by a group of girls who get together to think about what the house should be like and what it should hold. The girls already know many secrets of filming. They have their own techniques for staging and acting, and these are used to record the whole process. Some act as comedians, others as drivers, teachers, dancers. All are filmmakers. A film in which the first person charmingly dissolves into all these characters and into a historical memory to come, one that takes any shape that these girls may wish.
Lucía Salas