(China)

Dr. He Xiaopei is an independent film director and the founder of Pink Space, a Beijing-based NGO dedicated to promoting sexual rights and gender equality.

As a teenager, Xiaopei worked as a shepherd in the hills. After graduating from university, she joined the Chinese Mountaineering Team and climbed the Himalayas, including the Namcha Barwa summit. Following her mountaineering career, she served as an economist at the State Council, conducting research on economic reform for 14 years.

Since the 1990s, Xiaopei has been active in the feminist and lesbian movements in China and participated in the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. She later moved to the UK to pursue studies in sexuality and cultural studies, earning a Ph.D. before returning to China, where she founded Pink Space and began working with film as a medium to represent marginalised desires and lives.

Xiaopei's gaze is fearless, inquisitive, and driven by attentive observation and engagement with her subjects. Staying relentlessly close to lived reality, her films provide intimate insights into the lives she portrays, with an urgent commitment to bringing them into view. Humour and play are essential and shared tools in Xiaopei’s documentaries, used to maintain both a critical distance and a curious openness to contact and connection as she zooms in on the seemingly ordinary aspects of life to reveal them as potential sites for resistance to the larger socio-political forces shaping them.

Xiaopei’s films have been shown internationally at film festivals and institutions including Queer East Film Festival London, International Film Awards Berlin, Shanghai Queer Film Festival, China Independent Film Festival, and the Beijing Queer Film Festival