Dragon Girls

Xin Chenxi: Tears are an expression of weakness.

A sobering documentary portrait of childhood sacrifice and systemic pressure in elite martial arts training, balancing the girls' resilience against the emotional cost of conformity.

The documentary film Dragon Girls tells the story of three young Chinese girls training to become Kung Fu fighters, far away from their families, at the largest Kung Fu school in China. These girls, in a crowd of 26,000 children, are under constant pressure to conform to the norms and structures. They are turned into fighting robots and yet, if you look behind the curtain, you see children with dreams and aspirations. It show the controversial world of selection of the fittest in a totalitarian system.