Care on Set: Feminist Ethics and the Direction of Child Performers

As part of a wider project examining the relational nature of childhood performance—understood as emerging from a complex network of interactions among adult co-stars, fellow child actors, spatial environments, and, of course, filmmakers—this paper explores the ethics of directing child performers, taking the work of Chinese-American filmmaker Chloé Zhao as a case study. Film production cultures have tended to naturalise different practices that place emotional demands on non-professional actors. As Catherine O’Rawe notes, filmmakers “generally assume the right to impose distress on the non-professional” (2024, 15), and child performers are particularly vulnerable to this risk of exploitation (Lury 2010). Production histories reveal how different forms of emotional manipulation have often been legitimized as techniques for eliciting “authentic” or “natural” performances from young actors. For instance, Steven Spielberg has openly acknowledged employing manipulative strategies to provoke emotional responses from child actors in his films (Williams 2012). Such practices raise significant ethical questions regarding power, vulnerability, and care in the director–child performer relationship. Drawing on feminist ethics of vulnerability and care (Gilson 2013), this paper asks how alternative directing practices might reconfigure these relationships and challenge the normalization of exploitation in directing the child. In order to do so, it analyses Zhao’s work with children in her early feature Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015) and in Hamnet (2025), her latest film to date. By examining Zhao’s collaborative methods, as these are described in interviews and other paratextual materials, the study explores the extent to which her filmmaking practice models a more ethically attentive approach to directing children on screen. Ultimately, the paper contributes to broader debates on the ethics of child performance and the responsibilities of filmmakers working with vulnerable subjects.