Four Comrades, One Echo
by Kiva Liu
Research & project
Four Comrades, One Echo investigates sisterhood, solidarity and personal agency through the lives of my four ‘mothers’; my mother and her three sisters who each co-parented me at different stages of my life. Through collective storytelling, we trace their experiences as Chinese women navigating the Mao era and the post-reform transition to capitalism, exploring how they upheld their resilience and agency despite the ideological oppression they faced.
Rather than speaking ‘about’ them, I use filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha’s idea of “speaking nearby” to create a space for their voices to emerge on their own terms. We engage in a process of non-linear storytelling that incorporates games, fiction, and reenactment to confront trauma without replicating its violence. As scriptwriters of their imagined lives, they reclaim their narratives while preserving the solidarity that defines them.
The storytelling extends beyond film, evolving into writing, documentary theatre, personal archives and artist publications. It shifts between collective and individual expression, offering a space where the past resonates with the present. Ultimately, this research challenges dominant feminist discourses, advocating for a pluralistic understanding of ‘feminisms’ to emerge – one rooted in cultural, geographical and historical specificity.
Kiva Liu
Kiva Liu 刘宽 (b.1990, Sichuan, China) is a filmmaker and writer based between Beijing and Amsterdam. Her work explores how film practice, both as methodology and outcome of its mechanism, can be mobilized to stretch the space between journalism and poetry, feminism and generational dialogue, precarity and intimacy.
Her films have been screened internationally, and she received the Best Short award at the FIRST International Film Festival in 2021. She has directed and produced numerous documentary series for major platforms in China and previously served as editor-in-chief of One-Way Street Journal, a prominent Beijing-based literary magazine. Her writing, including non-fiction stories and poetry, has been published in The New York Times Magazine, Southern Weekly, VOGUE among many others.