Malaysia's festival darling Woo Ming Jin's new feature film is both the intimate documentation of a woman's life story and an absorbing piece of art. Focusing on 19 year old Ping Ping who tries to make her way to Japan for the promise of a better life, Woo has chosen the depiction of delicate moments and gestures rather than an overabundant dramatization to tell the story of her laboring body. Ping Ping works in several jobs to gather the money for an illegal border-crossing and to fulfill her dream of working in the car industry abroad. Serving and cleaning in a rundown restaurant for her aunt is one of them, selling pig sperm another one, and finally Ping Ping opts for surrogate motherhood to supplement the lacking money for her trafficking. What she cannot control however is her aunt Tien's exploitative intriguing. And when the protagonist gives birth to her child, Miss Tien fakes a dead birth, secretly selling the baby and taking in the money herself. After Ping Ping finds out, she decides to use the vicious circle of exploitation to achieve her final goal of leaving this life of hers behind.
Playing between the machine-like numbness of its characters and the highly emotionally charged events happening, THE TIGER FACTORY successfully avoids to enter into an exclusive mood of depression and stasis or optimistic resolution. Instead, it shows the ambivalent and complex situation of a protagonist who is both determined yet restricted — and does so in a style that is at once documentary and philosophical. Woo understands to raise the question of individual agency within a global market system where human beings and interpersonal relationships brutalize and finally numb very subtly. He avoids to turn Ping Ping into a mere exemplification of the exploited victim. But she is given a soul, a body, a voice, seemingly invisible, seemingly inaudible at first, but slowly emerging in the struggle for control over oneself. Maybe this allows her to escape from a vicious circle of exploitation. And maybe it just means her moving into a new one.
Synopsis written by: Feng-Mei Heberer
