Terracotta Daughters is a feature-length documentary following eight Chinese girls from 2015 to 2030, whose portraits inspired Prune Nourry’s 2012 art installation of 108 sculptures modeled on the Terracotta Army of Xian. At once intimate and political, the film captures their journey from childhood to adulthood.
SYNOPSIS
The story begins in 2012, when Prune Nourry met eight girls in rural Gansu. Collaborating with artisans in Xi’an, she created eight life-sized sculptures based on their portraits, blending their youthful faces with the form of the Terracotta Soldiers. From these originals, 108 unique sculptures were produced. This monumental art project, titled Terracotta Daughters, toured internationally before being buried in a secret location in China in 2015 during a performance entitled Earth Ceremony. The burial was both an artistic act and a symbolic gesture, coinciding with the end of the one-child policy. In 2030, when Chinese demographers predict the country’s gender imbalance will reach its peak, the sculptures will be unearthed, revealing not only fragments of clay but the missing women of a generation.
Since the burial, Prune and her all-female Chinese film crew have returned annually to follow the real lives of the girls. Now young women, their personal stories are intertwined with China’s transformations. The film focuses in particular on four women: Pan, an ambitious pastry maker dreaming of training in France; Huiyun, who struggles between the need to migrate for work and staying close to her elderly grandmother; Jianwei, a rebellious entrepreneur trying to break free from her oppressive adoptive family; and Haoping, newly married, torn between family expectations and her own aspirations. Their lives unfold against the backdrop of seismic events in contemporary China from Xi Jinping’s rise to power to the COVID-19 pandemic, economic shifts, and changing norms around marriage and motherhood.
ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)
Prune Nourry
Born in Paris in 1985, Prune Nourry lives and works between New York and Paris. A 2006 graduate in wood sculpture from the École Boulle in Paris, she is represented by Galerie Templon (Paris, Brussels) and Simon Studer Art (Switzerland). Her work raises ethical questions around the notion of balance in its broadest sense: the body and its healing process, demographic imbalance caused by gender selection and scientific excesses, ecosystems, and the interdependence of living species. Combining sculpture, installation, and performance, her projects often take the form of rituals involving burial or disappearance, documented through photography and video. Each of her works is geographically and temporally grounded through research that draws on disciplines beyond the field of art. Her practice is international in scope and often the result of collaborations with specialists such as geneticists, sociologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists, who, like her, are guided by the principle of serendipity. In 2018, she directed her first feature-length documentary, Serendipity (2019), which was presented at the Berlinale, MoMA, and the Tribeca Film Festival.
Maggie Li is a documentary producer based in Shanghai. She is best known for her work on Mistress Dispeller (2024) which world premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival in September 2024, in the Orizzonti section. It also screened at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. More recently the documentary The Dating Game directed by Violet Du Feng for which she was co-producer debuted at the Sundance Film Festival on January 23, 2025 in the World Documentary category.
ShenMi is a documentary and commercial advertisement photographer based in Beijing, China. In Shen Mi's career, she has not only gained international recognition in the field of documentaries but also achieved notable success with her feature-length work, Leftover Women, as the director of photography. This film was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Tribeca Film Festival and won the Best Documentary Award at the Philadelphia Film Festival.
RELATED LINKS
PROMOTE THIS PROJECT
Put a donation widget on your site. Click here for code.
ABOUT YOUR DONATION
Women Make Movies (WMM), Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit media arts organization registered with the New York Charities Bureau of New York State and accepts charitable donations on behalf of this project. Your donation will be spent by the filmmaker(s) toward the production and completion of this media project. No services or goods are provided by Women Make Movies, the filmmaker(s) or anyone else associated with this project in exchange for your charitable donation.
Your contributions are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law, and a confirmation of your donation will be sent via email. WMM will send you an acknowledgement letter in the mail to the address listed for tax purposes.