Visitors of the Night (1998)

A documentary as a 'parcours', a trip towards the not knowing. What started as a classical report of the Mosuo - a matriarchal tribe in China - became a poetic and self-reflective encounter. Where the neutral camera evolve into a playful and hypersubjective member of the emotional interaction between the Mosuogirls, the crew and the equipment. A curiosity towards a matriarchal society drove the director to the Mosuo, in China. Their society is build on the principle of the axia-relationship, a bound between 'visitors of the night'. This means that a man only stays in his wife's house at night. During the day he works for the benefit of his grandmother. Man and woman don't have any economical obligations towards each other. Their unique relationship is based on love only. Moreover, a Mosuo woman can have more than one axia. This is called polyandry. Due to funding by the Han-government, the Lugu-region has turned into a major touristic area, where tradition and modernity clash into one another. The film is not only a report on the relationship between the culture of the 'visitors of the night' and prostitution. It also reveals the distance between textual knowledge and the experience of a cinematographic journey.