Joanna Bowers recalls a similar response following the 2016 release of her documentary The Helper, which told the diverse stories of Hong Kong’s domestic worker community.

“Our film sought to portray these women in a different light to the downtrodden, invisible part of society—we showed them climbing mountains and singing on stage at music festivals, and I think it surprised people and obviously engaged everybody,” says Bowers. Through 2017 and 2018, numerous screenings of the film in Hong Kong sold out, something unheard of for a small, independent documentary. 

Bowers’ journey into storytelling was almost accidental. “I was always arts-driven—that was always my motivator. But I was also always told, ’No, you can’t just be a creative, you’ve got to be sensible’.” So she went to university to study broadcast journalism before heading to the centre of the film industry, Los Angeles, where she started out as an assistant writing treatments for television commercial directors, most of whom were older white men. “I had no idea that being a director was an option for me, because I had no role models,” she recalls.

That was until she was raising funding for a friend’s short film, production time came around and her friend suggested she direct it. “After my first day on set as a director, I was jumping around because I had totally found my thing,” she says.

Since then, aside from The Helper, her projects have included Refashioned, a film about three Hong Kong entrepreneurs on a mission to make fashion more sustainable, for which she gathered an almost entirely female crew. She has also branched out into other media, including a podcast series exploring cultivated meat with Sonalie Figueiras, founder of Green Queen; and My Extra Special Aunty, a children’s book published in May, which platforms the issues facing migrant domestic workers and features illustrations by domestic workers Cristina Cayat and Noemi Caballero Manguerra.

See also: Migrant Domestic Leaders: How domestic workers are using art to help their peers in Hong Kong

Bowers is particularly aware of the importance of representation. “When my eight-year-old daughter sees a woman centred in a story or in a piece of content, she immediately engages in a completely different way. I hadn’t realised until recently that if she didn’t see that, she didn’t see herself there, and that’s really been something inspiring to me,” says Bowers, who is starting work on a new documentary, which will tell the story of Gold Team, a programme providing free coaching and academic support to underprivileged Hong Kong girls with basketball potential, which aims to get them scholarships to prep schools and then universities in the US, with the ultimate goal of getting the first Hong Kong woman into the WNBA. “This is why we have to continually push for this representation, because there is this whole next generation of little girls coming up and I don’t want them to face any of those limitations or boundaries that we felt and that we feel like we’re still having to push through.”

“There are a lot of gendered expectations, which I feel are perpetuated through pop culture, and I think telling women’s stories authentically and honestly pushes back against that and shows that women can thrive in a variety of different [ways],” adds Chong. “There’s no one story of the perfect woman or the perfect life for a woman to have. There are just so many different ways that you can live out being a woman without having to be shackled to society’s idea that you have to be a wife, you have to be a mother, you have to be skinny, you have to fulfil all these things and jump through all these hoops. The more that the world can embrace a broader idea of womanhood, the better it will be for the generation of girls that’s coming up.”

Psychobitch is playing at Summerhall for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe from August 1 to 26 and tickets are available here. 

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