The screening on 9 August will be followed by an online Q&A with the director Li Yifan, moderated by Fan Xiang.
A joint presentation by tat/boo and Chinese Cinema Project, Li Yifan’s documentary We Were Smart offers a rare first-hand account of the Shamate youth subculture that emerged among young rural migrant workers in China during the 2000s.
Known for their dramatic hairstyles, bold fashion, and online communities, Shamate youth were widely mocked and dismissed by mainstream society. Through video testimonies and interviews with former members, the film reveals the lived realities behind the style: left-behind childhoods, factory labour, displacement, loneliness, and the search for belonging. More than a portrait of an internet phenomenon, We Were Smart is a powerful reflection on class, visibility, and youth self-expression.
Fan Xiang teaches at the University of Birmingham. Her teaching and research focus on film festivals and grassroots film culture, women’s filmmaking, archives and digital media culture. Her monograph, Contemporary Art Cinema Culture in China (2024), offers an ethnographic account of the role of independent exhibition, underground distribution, and online film criticism in shaping art cinema culture in twenty-first-century China. The book was the runner-up for the BAFTSS Best First Monograph Award.
tat/boo’s practice unfolds around the idea of ‘the body as language’, focusing on Chinese youth around the millennial turn. It asks how, when emotion could not be spoken aloud, they invented for themselves a language of body, object, and symbol: one pushed outside the mainstream, yet real enough to live by.
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