Tongzhi in Love

Tongzhi in Love (2008) is a 30-minute documentary film directed by Ruby Yang which portrays the life of gay men in China. The film was produced by Thomas Lennon and features music by Bill Frisell. The film's premiere will be at the Frameline Film Festival in San Francisco on 28 June 2008. (Film was previously known as A Double Life and appears under that title in the Frameline catalog.) "Tongzhi" means "comrade" and has become a slang term for "gay".

In Tongzhi in Love (f.k.a.A Double Life), their latest and most lyrical film yet, the Oscar-winning team of director Ruby Yang and producer Thomas Lennon have captured an intimate, poignant portrait of three young men navigating the precarious dilemmas of living out and gay in modern China, torn between the lure of big city life and the powerful demands of generations of cultural tradition.

Frog and his friends, Feng and Ze, live and work in cosmopolitan Beijing, reveling in a level of freedom that sophisticated urban life affords. Yet a Chinese son’s solemn duty is to produce a child and to carry forward his family’s line and name. Does their relative freedom and happiness come at the expense of their parents and centuries of cultural tradition? Can they live out and be happy and still be “good sons”? China’s laws limiting most families to a single child only compounds pressures on gay men, many of whom resort to sham marriages.