Elizabeth Lo, director of Mistress Dispeller Photo: Supplied
A documentary featuring a mistress dispeller in a Chinese love triangle is coming to New Zealand next week as part of the International Film Festival.
Titled Mistress Dispeller, the documentary follows the story of Mr and Mrs Li, a couple living in Luoyang, Henan province, and the husband's mistress, Feifei.
Director of the film, Hong Kong-based Elizabeth Lo, told RNZ's Nine To Noon that the mistress dispelling phenomenon had developed in China over the past 10 years to meet the demands of couples in crisis.
She said having a mistress was once almost like a badge of honour for a man to show how successful he was.
The service had filled a gap for people who didn't want to leave their marriages because they had discovered infidelity but wanted to combat it, Lo said.
"It's almost like a tool that oftentimes wives ... can use if they have resources to hire someone who can ... fight for them ... and to resolve this conflict in as nonviolent and as non-confrontational a way as possible," Lo said.
Lo said solving the issue indirectly under the surface could help anyone avoid "losing face" and for the mistress to "leave the situation without resistance because she believes in it's her own will".
Through scouring social media to find mistress dispellers, Lo's team came across a woman named Wang, who would later lead the film.
"She was able incredibly to get us access to husbands and wives and mistresses who [were] willing to be on camera because she had so much trust built with them through her techniques as a mistress dispeller," Lo said.
Wang, who struggled with infidelity in her own immediate family, read a lot on psychology to "understand how the human heart works".
"She has developed this niche within the market of sort of like family therapy, where her job is basically to insinuate herself within a family that is struggling with infidelity," Lo said.
"Hired by one party, she will enter that relationship under a false identity, perhaps as a college, long lost college friend or an old family friend.
"And through that identity, get to know the spouse and also their mistress and through a friendship that she forges with them over several months, kind of gains their ear and influences them to end the affair of their own accord."
Lo said Wang didn't use illegal tactics or tactics of intimidation that other mistress dispellers sometimes used.
"She really positions herself as this sort of couple's therapist and therapist even to the mistress, so that, by the end of the process, each person in the love triangle sees her as the guiding light that's really helping them in their lives," Lo said.
Wang said that therapy was largely stigmatised in China, so she wouldn't have been able to join a family as a family therapist - only under a false identity, Lo recalled.
To ensure the content was ethical, the husband and mistress were not told what the film contained precisely but were approached to appear in a film "more broadly about modern love and dating in China", Lo said.
Over the course of filming for three or four months, the film would be shown to the couple and they would be given an opportunity to re-consent to being included in the project or withdraw after they grasped the mistress dispeller's true role in their lives.
"Thankfully ... this trio at the end of three years, they were so gracious and unself-conscious that ... they trust[ed] teacher Wang so much that they agreed to remain featured."
Wang made a decent living out of providing the service, charging by the hour.
It typically cost around US$20,000 (NZ$33,000) to resolve a case, Lo said.
Irrespective of whether people would agree if the service was ethical, Lo said Wang truly believed that she was helping people in moments of crisis that they typically suffered in alone because it was shrouded in shame.
"She positions herself and even in participating in this documentary and convincing her clients to be a part of this documentary, that sharing your private struggles publicly will help other people who find themselves in this kind of emotional turmoil where it's so difficult to navigate with clarity."
Mistress Dispeller is showing in Auckland, Wellington and Hamilton from next week.
