ProfileUnstoppable: Asia’s first female UFC champion Zhang Weili’s story told in gripping new documentary

Not for nothing is the FIRST International Film Festival oft-referred to as “China’s Sundance”, after the legendary indie-cinema love-in, founded by Robert Redford and held every year in the US state of Utah. And like Sundance, you make your way to the city of Xining, in central China, if you want to catch up with the latest trends in Chinese independent cinema. Perhaps take in experimental films that reflect the issues facing the youth of today, maybe get a chance to mingle with some of the country’s creative trendsetters. At this July’s programme, a world-premiere documentary dropped, playing to houses so packed there were people sitting shoulder to shoulder on aisle steps, and ended up walking away with the Chanel-sponsored First Frame prize for best feature film. Profiling a young Chinese woman who competes in the most brutal contact-sports league on Earth, Unstoppable follows about three years in the life of Zhang Weili, the first female Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) winner from Asia. The 35-year-old mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter is stopped by about every second person she passes on the street or at functions, and instead of the usual, anodyne press-conference queries, when Zhang takes the mic after one screening, she is greeted by one young woman after another, praising her for being an inspiration, and at one point, a 20-ish-looking fan shares a poem that brings the fighter to tears. “I never really thought about how people might react to the film,” says Zhang. “Maybe seeing my experiences, my hardships, will help people following their own path.” Zhang was born into the hardscrabble life of rural Handan, in the northern province of Hebei. Industry littered the landscape with coal mines and steel mills, and a teenage Zhang hoped she’d find herself lucky enough to land a job as a security guard, after a back injury threatened to bring a promising athletic career to an early end. As the fighter recalls, it was after moving to Beijing, aged 17, where she worked as everything from a cashier to a kindergarten assistant while continuing to train and to train others, that one otherwise unremarkable day, she spied an MMA cage set up inside a gym, just sitting there. Long before whoever it was had set up that cage in Beijing, MMA had been growing around the world, as martial artists from disparate training schools began to square off against each other: jiu-jitsu vs judo, Muay Thai vs karate, there were no cross-disciplinary limits. One apocryphal trail says Bruce Lee first sparked the MMA flame when he laid down a judo chokehold on fellow Hong Kong kung fu star Sammo Hung Kam-bo at the outset of the 1973 classic Enter the Dragon. But in formal terms, there were prize bouts matching individual fighters from separate martial arts as far afield as Brazil, Japan and Hong Kong, as far back as the 1950s. The UFC, which would become the dominant force in first evolving, then expanding the sport, emerged in the United States in the early 90s, and by the early 2000s it was recruiting fighters from across the globe and attracting a broadcast audience in the tens of millions. By then it was a far different beast from the early disparagement of the concept being nothing more than “human cockfighting”. Zhang’s coach, Cai Xuejun, had become interested in MMA through watching bootleg VCDs and DVDs and started training a group of fighters at the Black Tiger Fight Club in Beijing when he happened upon a 23-year-old Zhang, staring at an empty cage. “I was impressed by how strong she was,” says Cai, speaking on the sidelines of the FIRST festival. “You could tell she had the motivation to fight, and to win. Sometimes she needs to be pushed but she always reacts, she always makes herself better. “Many people still don’t know what goes into MMA and this film will help them see that.” Zhang’s background certainly pointed her towards the sport. Handan has for centuries been home to kung fu schools and famed warriors. Everyone in the city knows these stories and a young Zhang was drawn towards kung fu, sanda – the Chinese form of kickboxing – and Chinese wrestling known as shuai jiao. Weili’s impact has been tremendous – to the sport of MMA, to the UFC, and as an inspiration to an entire generation of Chinese athletes, especially women Kevin Chang, UFC senior vice-president in Asia What elevated Zhang in the MMA cage, pretty much immediately, was her speed and relentless attacking. According to UFC stats, Zhang, in every minute, in every one of her fights, has averaged nearly 10 strikes that cause significant damage to her opponents, and she has a frightening dedication to training. After losing her first official MMA bout, she went on a 16-0 run before signing with the UFC, where she started off at 3-0, then finished off Brazilian Jéssica Andrade in just 42 seconds in Shenzhen to claim the UFC women’s strawweight crown, China’s first world title in the sport, in 2019. Jon Anik, a UFC cage-side commentator, has been into MMA for longer than he cares to remember. So long, in fact, he has managed to establish his own “fighter card library” that now boasts the detailed history of around 2,000 fighters, and “Zhang is at the top of the list with the all-time greats”, says Anik via email. “My broadcast partner [UFC Hall of Famer] Daniel Cormier has suggested she is the greatest athlete he has ever seen and, while that could be a little hyperbolic, he may not be far off. I’m confident she would have excelled in many sports, but she certainly understood the commitment it would take to realise greatness in MMA. She talks a lot about hard work and burying the lazy person who resides within.” The Las Vegas-based UFC made no secret of its designs on the Chinese market as it expanded globally, opening a US$13 million branded Performance Institute in Shanghai in 2019, holding annual workouts to identify talent and signing the very best from established MMA leagues across the country. But the programme needed a star, and in Zhang, it found one. “Weili’s impact has been tremendous – to the sport of MMA, to the UFC, and as an inspiration to an entire generation of Chinese athletes, especially women,” says Kevin Chang, UFC senior vice-president in Asia. “She has been the catalyst for the UFC’s rise to becoming a mainstream sport in China and has captured the attention of fans around the world. She shatters social media and viewership records every time she fights.” And there are stats to back that up. According to the UFC, Zhang’s online following expanded from 100,000 to a million after she took the title from Andrade, and after a recent bout that figure jumped overnight to 12.3 million. When Zhang fights now, the UFC becomes the most engaged sport across Chinese social media platforms Douyin and Weibo, and her name trends at No 1 across Douyin, Kuaishou, Weibo, Weixin and Bilibili. While the Zhang origin story comes full of colour and drama, nothing could have prepared filmmaker Xu Huijing for what was to follow after accepting the fighter’s invitation to document her life. “We both come from rural parts of northern China,” says the Shanxi-raised Xu, who sifted through 1,000 hours of footage for Unstoppable. “I wanted to tell a story of how someone from this part of the country can struggle but make something of themselves.” Shooting began soon after Zhang’s first title defence on March 7, 2020, a five-round bloodbath against former champion Joanna Jedrzejczyk that ended with the Polish fighter’s head horribly disfigured by a hematoma, and with the global MMA community lauding the bout as the best women’s fight in history. From that life-changing high, Zhang’s life hurtled back to earth, with consecutive losses, in the ring to American Rose Namajunas, and at home, with the death of a much-loved pet she had to put down. “I can always get the belt back,” says the fighter, in one of the film’s more emotional moments. Xu’s cameras follow Zhang as she picks up the pieces, giving viewers a fly-on-the-wall view of life inside the world of MMA, allowing the candid side of the fighter to reveal itself, even as she goes through training and fight conditions that often seem beyond human. Zhang rises again to recapture the title and, during the course of that part of her journey, she seems to transform fully into someone at ease with her unique place in the world. “When you come from that hard background you have to grab opportunities when they come,” says Xu. “When you reflect on yourself, you improve yourself and you become happy with who you are. That’s the biggest lesson I learned from being near her.” Zhang’s first UFC fight in front of a home crowd was in November 2018, way down the undercard of UFC Fight Night 141, at the Cadillac Arena in Beijing. While much of the attention that night focused on Yan Xiaonan – the first Chinese woman to sign to the UFC – Cai grabbed an opportunity to present his fighter to the press and declare that while Yan may have been that first, Zhang would be “China’s first world champion”. And he was right. Zhang dismantled veteran Mexican fighter Jessica Aguilar in less than one round at the Beijing event, taking her UFC record to 2-0. Zhang laughs at the memory, when we sit down, fresh from her viewing of the finished Unstoppable, and from that emotional Q&A. And then she shares a story from her childhood, of how her mother tried to strengthen her by making her dig holes in their garden, then climb in and jump out, unassisted. Once a jump was successfully completed, the hole would be dug deeper, and on the process would go. She laughs at the memory, “The jumps!” The documentary reveals a strong filial bond, showing Zhang making video calls from overseas almost constantly, using cameras she had set up previously in her mother and father’s respective homes. “Life for my parents was hard,” she says, “so I have always wanted to help.” Now that the documentary has wrapped, Zhang has her acting debut set for release by the end of 2024. In the Li Yu-directed thriller After Typhoon, Zhang stars alongside Chinese box-office heavyweights Yao Chen and Angelica Lee Sinje, in a tale that pits its all-female cast against everything nature can throw at them. Seems daunting, but ultimately, she says, it’s all an internal process anyway. “When I get in the cage I don’t see an opponent, I see myself,” she says. “My opponent is like a mirror, and to beat her is to beat myself.”