Filmed over 17 years across Southern China, this remarkable film is an intimate and heart-wrenching portrait of Li Ermao, a transgender migrant worker, who performs in clubs looking for love and acceptance. Living as a “ladyboy” with a string of boyfriends, she faces repeated encounters of prejudice and aggression with equal measures of resilience and vulnerability. With a flair for the dramatic and her budding career as a popstar, Ermao’s story takes many dramatic twists and surprising turns as she moves between the urban and the rural, searching for identity and fighting for a better life.
Competing for the RAI Film Prize and Basil Wright Film Prize.
A pre-recorded conversation between Andrè Singer and Angela Piccini is available here.
You can read an interview by Lucy James with Kiki Tianqi Yu, the producer of The Two Lives of Li Ermao, on our blog.
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China, United Kingdom
An interview with The Two Lives of Li Ermao producer André Singer, by Angela Piccini.