This week, NüVoices host and board member Solarina Ho and Hong Kong filmmaker Elizabeth Lo discuss the director’s award-winning new documentary, Mistress Dispeller, which premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival last September. The film is now playing in select U.S. theaters.
The intimate film follows a middle-aged couple and Wang Zhenxi, a “Mistress Dispeller”, who is hired by the wife to end the husband’s affair with a younger woman. Solarina and Elizabeth discuss the film’s meditative exploration of relationships, how Wang inserts herself into this couple’s life, and how the couple — and the mistress — navigate the complex dynamics and emotions of marriage and infidelity, and their place within broader Chinese society. Elizabeth also discusses the painstaking, years-long process of finding her central characters, and the remarkable trust and sensitivity required that allowed her to tell their stories.
On why the mistress dispelling industry thrives in China:
“I think what is perhaps slightly more unique or heightened in Asian culture is this need for face, to keep the facade as it is, to maintain that even as you’re fixing things beneath the surface, to not have everything be directly confrontational, to have indirect work arounds that are more subtle. And that’s why the whole industry of mistress dispelling thrives. It’s to indirectly solve a problem, not to directly confront it.”
On aligning with ethics while filming a controversial subject:
“In order to produce this film as a real documentary, it would require that level of commitment and trial and error and time and patience, and so in order to do that — because deception is inherent to Teacher Wang’s work — the husband and the mistress couldn’t have known what the film was about initially, so they were approached by Wang’s business partner to participate in a film more broadly about modern love and dating in China, and that’s what they had agreed to at first, but by the end of the process, in order to stay ethical as filmmakers, we knew that we had to become transparent with them by the end.”
On marriage and love after filming the documentary:
“I believe there is a lot of love in the world, and I think the only thing that maybe prevents us from being able to express it and maintain it are these external forces that might tie love to a market ideology or partnership to a market ideology, and those are the forces or societal expectation.
Those are the forces that get in the way of us connecting with each other. But at the heart of it, what I see in this film, despite their struggles, and despite what people may argue is lovelessness or full of love, for me, it’s people are lonely but desperately wanting to connect, even if sometimes they’re failing to.”
Note: This conversation was originally recorded in December 2024.
Shownotes:
Learn more about the film here.
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Anora by Sean Baker
About our guest:
Elizabeth Lo was born in Hong Kong and is now based in Los Angeles. She holds a BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and an MFA from Stanford. She’s directed short documentaries including Hotel 22 and Mother’s Day, and the feature film, Stray. Her most recent work, Mistress Dispeller, had its world premiere at the 2024 Venice International Film Festival where it won two awards. She is also a producer and cinematographer whose documentary films have screened at TIFF, Sundance, Tribeca, and elsewhere. Her debut feature, Stray, won Best International Feature at Hot Docs and received nominations including the Independent Spirit Awards and Critics Choice Documentary Awards.
About our host:
Solarina Ho is a freelance reporter and writer with two decades of journalism experience, most of which was spent at Reuters. She currently writes on a broad range of health, general, and business news for various publications and organizations, with a particular focus on COVID-19. Her personal areas of interest include topics related to China, women’s issues, media/journalism, immigration, the environment, space exploration, technology, and pop culture (with a particular weakness for Asian dramas). She’s on X @shtweet
Episode credits:
Producer: Wing Kuang
Editor, sound engineer: Rebecca Liu
Managing Editor: Megan Cattel