A Chinese translation of this essay can be found in the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute’s newsletter.
A Family Tour (Ying Liang, 2018).
The night I arrived in Taipei for the fourteenth Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF), I was thinking about a film I’d seen a year ago, Ying Liang’s A Family Tour (2018). A semi-autobiographical feature, it follows Yang Shu, a Chinese director exiled in Hong Kong after her films run afoul of the Communist Party of China (CPC). She is invited to a festival in Kaohsiung, Taiwan; the film she presents there closely resembles Ying’s own, When Night Falls (2012).1 Yang and her husband see the festival as an opportunity for their Hong Kong–born son to meet Yang’s mother, Xiaolin—who has remained in China and been harassed by police because of her daughter’s films—for the first time. In Hong Kong, their meeting would be heavily surveilled by Mainland authorities, but it might be possible in Taiwan, a more independent and self-governed space. Xiaolin joins a sanctioned group tour scheduled during the festival, and Yang’s group rendezvouses with her at the tour locations while pretending to be strangers—a family acting as if they were never one.
A Family Tour is a stinging appraisal of film festivals from the perspective of an exiled filmmaker. Throughout the film, the festival only exacerbates Yang’s worries about whether she can reconcile her wish to keep her family together with her film career. The festival organizers are only interested in Yang as a dissident artist defined by her opposition to the CPC, and not in her real feelings, which cannot be neatly politicized. When an interviewer asks her a loaded question outside a screening about whether she considers herself Chinese or a Hong Konger, she smiles plainly and replies, “I’m just an outsider.”
Yang wryly rebukes the festival’s slogan, “No one can stay an outsider,” which paints it as a universally inclusive community. Film scholar Victor Fan argues that Yang’s refusal to assimilate to China, Hong Kong, or the space of the Taiwanese festival shows that her life has become an extraterritorial one, which trespasses national boundaries. But I think this is only part of the story. Yang is alienated not just because she rejects the definitions imposed by these borders, but also because the institutions around her, including the festival, engage in what political theorist Samera Esmeir calls the conflation of the world with the international:
Once international, understood as a domain with its own institutions and practices distinct from the local, has stepped in for world, exclusion from the international amounts to exclusion from the world. Paradoxically, conceiving of an all-inclusive international, and thus enabling more actors to join international society, only intensifies the risk of exclusion, of becoming less of the world…. An implicit fragility and danger exists unless one insists on a world that remains in excess of international, unless one refuses the conflation of world with international.2
In dominant legal discourses, the international abstracts and supplants the world, rendering it a flat surface—a map—divided by nations into states and territories. The world, Esmeir continues, is no longer “made and remade by individuals and collectivities, humans and non-humans, material and immaterial forces”; it becomes “the domain of the geographer and the cartographer…a limit concept from which and in which one [can] be excluded and included.” Those who cannot claim a place on this map are removed from legal and political life; they become worldless. This is the tragedy that befalls Yang’s family—her world—which cannot be recognized by the institutions outside of it. Her family disintegrates by the film’s end, when Xiaolin suffers an unexpected accident and returns to China as state authorities there catch onto their meetings.
Film festivals claiming to be “international” cannot take this term for granted, nor can they be content to offer platitudes about the unifying power of art. This year, it was impossible to ignore that festivals upheld an international that was built on the ongoing destruction of Palestine, an international whose raison d’être is to secure nation-states for some by producing the worldlessness of others. Festivals like the Berlinale and the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam suppressed pro-Palestinian voices calling for justice from the river to the sea, while others, like Tribeca and Sundance, omitted Palestinian perspectives altogether while hosting Israeli state-affiliated films and cultural ambassadors. Cultural institutions can only resist the international’s deadly capture and diminishment of the world by making room for those the concept erases. Throughout my time in Taiwan, I wondered if visiting a festival in a place with its own fraught relationship to the international, stuck in an absurd diplomatic limbo, could help me think about how we might create a truly worldly film community.
Libangbang: Ching-Wen’s Not Home (Kuo Chen-ti, 2000).
Occurring biennially since 1998, TIDF is a major Asian hub for documentary cinema. Its mainstay Asian Vision, International, and Taiwan competitions are accompanied by programs on archival/found footage film, obscure but vital corners of Taiwanese film history, the wider Sinophone world, and filmmakers and film scenes from abroad (this year, Myanmar, Ukraine, and Slovakia were spotlighted). I was most intrigued by one of these side programs, Reel Taiwan: Floating Islands, a set of documentary shorts about Taiwan’s outlying islands, tackling themes such as the impacts of militarization, tourism, and environmental and Indigenous struggles. These films felt immediately relevant to issues in Hawaiʻi, where I’m from.
Between 1999 and 2000, a group of intrepid directors led by Zero Chou launched an experimental art project called Floating Islands, shooting twelve films about the numerous islands surrounding Taiwan. They vary widely in approach: there are formal send-ups of nature documentaries (Silent Delta, 2001) and military propaganda (<The Pratas Islands>...Tong-Sha, an Isle Like a Crab, 2000); historical inquiries into vanished villages (Turtle Island: Nostalgic Voices, 2000) or former prison camps (My Own Private Green Island, 2000); a hilarious, sitcom-like exploration of a desolate island to which demerited cops are banished (West Island, 2000); and a portrait of the pressures that are driving a Tao family’s children away from their island, Pongso no Tao (Libangbang: Ching-Wen’s Not Home, 2000).
I’d never heard of Floating Islands before, and all eight of the films I saw from the project were revelatory. The unique journeys of the filmmakers, whether they were new to the islands or tracing their own family stories there, came through strongly. The films capture the inquisitive spirit of the time in which they were made, not long after the end of Kuomintang-led martial law in Taiwan and the lifting of restrictions on travel to geopolitically sensitive island regions like Kinmen. No longer chained to the Kuomintang’s ambitions of retaking a greater China, islands that had been used as military bases were at least partially demilitarized. The slow-healing wounds of the Chinese Civil War were being more openly acknowledged, even if tensions never really subsided in the Taiwan Strait. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s freer political climate opened up new conversations about the overlapping histories of colonialism in the region, and the idea of Taiwan as a self-determining island nation was being debated and gaining traction. The Floating Islands films portray Taiwanese identity as a contact zone between a Sino-centric world and the wider Pacific, shaped by an archipelagic milieu rather than just its proximity to a mainland.
03:04 (Huang Ting-fu, 2000).
Some of the films, however, betray a strong anxiety that the past can’t be so easily buried. Huang Ting-fu’s 03:04 (2000) is a plaintive procession of observational shots of Kinmen, glimpsing everyday life in dilapidated interiors and the remnants of military infrastructure. The islanders and soldiers onscreen, shown in idle moments of downtime at work, seem suspended in states of placid inactivity, as if waiting to be called to action. The film feels anticipatory in its stillness. Is this the waiting room of history, an interval between conflicts? Is a rejection of the influence of any mainland enough to be truly free from it?
03:04 could be compared to two recent shorts that didn’t screen at TIDF, but which feature Kinmen: S. Leo Chiang’s more conventional Island in Between (2023) and Erica Sheu’s abstract missive It follows It passes on (2022). Chiang’s New York Times Op-Doc sees him visiting Kinmen, where he reflects on his Taiwanese American identity. “I feel like a kid whose parents are involved in a three-way custody battle—hostile, codependent, manipulative, each pair with their own dysfunctions,” narrates Chiang. Kinmen is mainly used as a metaphor for Taiwan’s vexed position between China and the US. But this framing is problematic, as Kinmen is a unique place which cannot stand in for all of Taiwan, and Chiang doesn’t give the islanders much time to speak. His overriding focus on US-China relations, and his desire to give a basic explanation of cross-strait histories for an American audience, flatten the complexities of Kinmenese opinion regarding both Taiwan and China. Sheu’s film, as if trying to escape this representational trap altogether, eschews a recognizable geography, illuminating her father’s memories of Kinmen in flickers of light through water, grains of sand, and incense smoke. Here, Kinmen does not exist only “in between” more important places. It is a land carried within, animated by minor stories and commonplace rituals. 03:04 occupies an aesthetic and thematic middle ground in between Chiang’s justified fears of great power conflict and Sheu’s desire to step outside of this well-trodden geopolitical framing.
Thinking about these films together, I recalled something Jia Zhangke wrote in a 2011 essay about Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (1989), the first film to depict the February 28 incident in Taiwan—a 1947 popular uprising violently put down by the military. He recalls how he felt as a young man learning of the film’s Golden Lion win in Venice, months after the Tiananmen Square protests were crushed:
…Hou Xiaoxian used sadness to define his island, not sure whether he knew that this phrase also encompasses all the unspoken melancholy here in mainland China… Under the long take, the new political authority was still busy establishing order, and the civilians under pressure had already walked into the streets. Are the guns aimed at our lives?3
Bridging disparate times and geographies, Jia linked the sadness in Taiwan after the February 28 incident with the sadness in China after June 4. Floating Islands, too, evinces and links the past and present feelings that many islands share. The places we cherish for their diverse histories always seem to be threatened by the territorializing projects of larger, landed nations, leaving us staring down the guns aimed at our lives.
No Winter Holidays (Rajan Kathet and Sunir Pandey, 2023).
Many films in competition at TIDF dealt with rural or underdeveloped communities, creating jarring contrasts between the places I saw onscreen in the theater and the modern, hyper-urbanized city just outside. This owes much to the legacy of Shinsuke Ogawa and Kidlat Tahimik’s landmark Asian Documentary Filmmakers Manifesto, published during the inaugural 1989 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, which urged Asian filmmakers to confront “third-world realities” and “international imbalances.” Roused by these words, Taiwanese filmmakers established independent production houses to put documentaries in service of social activism. TIDF was founded during this pivotal moment. In an era of rapid financialization, which flooded theaters with Hollywood fare and almost caused the collapse of domestic film production, the growing popularity of documentaries helped revitalize Taiwan’s film industry.
This year’s selection of rural cinema included many films that took an observational and longitudinal approach, letting ecological cycles, the rhythms of village life, and the cumulative impacts of development play out. Plants, animals, mountains, and even the air itself become memorable characters. Consider Anupama Srinivasan and Anirban Dutta’s Flickering Lights (2023), which chronicles the electrification of villages on the unstable India-Myanmar border, and Rajan Kathet and Sunir Pandey’s No Winter Holidays (2023), about two elderly women who caretake their village in the Himalayan foothills while their neighbors winter in Kathmandu. No frivolous drama is wrung out of these highly procedural films, where people toil away as the seasons change, occasionally piercing their laborious routines by divulging personal stories: of a life spent waiting for war to end, or of a bittersweet romance.
Two films from China were produced as part of preeminent documentarian Wu Wenguang’s long-running Folk Memory Project, which collects oral histories from the Chinese countryside, especially areas which experienced the Great Famine: Zhang Mengqi’s Self-Portrait: 47 KM 2020 (2023) and Hu Sanshou’s Resurrection (2024). Zhang’s film details the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in her father’s village, nicknamed “47 KM.” While daily life is upended for city-dwellers, here it just goes on (with some modifications), with villagers gossiping about case numbers and death tolls while working the land according to the 24 Chinese solar terms. The village children’s ideas about the virus run wild—some fear it, some aren’t concerned—but their imaginative mental models of the world around them, shared in sit-down interviews or while traipsing through muddy fields, inspire us to devise our own.
Resurrection (Hu Sanshou, 2024).
Talking and laboring, continuity and rupture: these threads are also present in Resurrection. In Hu’s hometown, villagers bust open graves to retrieve their ancestors’ bones, or what’s left of them, in preparation for a highway project that will slice through the village. Their indelicate treatment of human remains is initially shocking, but by structuring each scene around a different gravesite, the film locks into a familiar rhythm as gestures and procedures are repeated by each group of people. We become accustomed to the mingling of the dead and the living, as the villagers chatter about their (not always pleasant) impressions of the people they’re digging up, and the rough lives those people lived. This is not an activist film in which people rally against the highway’s construction. They endure the hardships forced upon them, as did those who brought them into the world.
Despite its bleakness, Resurrection is strangely dignifying. Like the other films I saw from rural settings, it identifies a capacity for adaptability, informal self-government, and resilience in these remote areas, which no central or metropolitan authority can suppress. Frustrated by the slow progress on the construction of infrastructure, the villagers in Flickering Lights meet to hash out their problems, sharing the responsibility to finish the job themselves. The women in No Winter Holidays, widowed by the same man, learn to rely on each other despite their grudges to weather the lonely days. And in the final scene of Resurrection, the villagers arduously carry a corpse up a hill in one long take, almost spilling the bones when some of the men stumble but pressing onward. I might have a morbid sense of humor, but I found this scene slightly slapstick. It’s a tragicomic testament to the strength of these people, who embody a kind of ordinary jianghu4, carving out their stoic, unsettled lives under the mandates of state capitalism.
Crossing Voices (Raphaël Grisey and Bouba Touré, 2022).
Still, it is dangerous to fetishize stoicism or resilience, especially when it obscures the fact that the needs of rural people are systemically neglected by the state. How can resilience turn into capacity-building? This is the question Raphaël Grisey and the late Bouba Touré pose in Xaraasi Xanne: Crossing Voices (2022), a brisk, whirlwind montage of pan-African history from TIDF’s International Competition. It draws connections between the colonial destruction of sub-Saharan agro-ecologies, the strikes of migrant workers in France, and the return of some of these migrant workers to West Africa, where in 1977 they founded Somankidi Coura, a farming cooperative based along the Senegal River. Tunneling through centuries, Crossing Voices’s nonlinear collision of past, present, and future is reminiscent of Ogawa’s epic Magino Village: A Tale (1987).
Touré, an artist, activist, and founding member of Somankidi Coura, documented everything around him, building up an immense personal archive of anti-colonial struggle. The tremendous volume of images in Crossing Voices (which also includes footage from Touré’s contemporaries, like Med Hondo and Sidney Sokhona) foreground the archive’s accumulative force. Paralleling farming and filmmaking, Grisey treats the archive as a kind of soil that accretes slowly over generations, “plowing” its layers of time through the edit so that new ideas may grow. Like soil, archival materials can be rapidly exploited and exhausted by colonial practices. But, with the appropriate care, they can also fuel and restore a people’s relationship with the land.
Touré constantly moves between France and West Africa, transplanting situated knowledges from one place to another. It was important for Somankidi Coura to advance their decolonial praxis by learning techniques from French farmers in Champagne, just as it was important for the sans-papiers to understand that their movement was not merely about securing domestic rights, but one which could determine Africa’s future. An image of the artist as a Gramscian organic intellectual emerges, someone who speaks not for one continent or the other but for those who traverse the seas between them. For Touré and Grisey, the potentials of rural intelligence for regenerating the world depend on the solidarities forged through migration: a fundamental human practice that is managed by (post)colonial and national authorities, but which carries the possibility of overwhelming and overturning those structures.
Gama (Kaori Oda, 2023).
I am skeptical that one can claim to know a place from seeing it onscreen for a few hours. In the Q&A after No Winter Holidays, I was surprised to learn from Kathet that Dhorpatan, the region in Nepal where the film is shot, regularly attracts scores of tourists who come to hunt wildlife; I would have never guessed this from the film’s bucolic setting. The touristic consumption of images has repercussions in the built environment: in Taiwan, some of the mountain towns in Hou’s New Wave films (such as Jiufen, which I took some time off from the festival to visit) are now overcrowded tourist traps, their charming allure distorted into a nostalgic simulation.
Even if films can’t fully disavow the tourist gaze, they can cultivate a greater sense of responsibility toward the places they depict. Kaori Oda’s Gama (2023), my festival favorite, takes us on a tour led by Mitsuo Matsunaga, a “peace guide” who brings people into the gama (caves) where villagers hid during the Battle of Okinawa. These caves became the sites of mass suicides, as those in the gama feared that American troops in Okinawa would subject them to fates worse than death. In a chant-like prosody, Matsunaga tells the stories of people who survived—a group of villagers in one cave avoided suicide only because Okinawans from Hawaiʻi convinced them that they wouldn’t be harmed. While Matsunaga speaks, a woman in blue (Nao Yoshigai) wanders through the gama, possibly representing the mabui, or spirit, of these locations.
Oda builds an immersive atmosphere through stark lighting of the pitch-black caves, and by making what Matsunaga calls “dark experiences” a central element. These are moments during his tour when he turns off all of the lights in the cave, plunging the theater into darkness and transforming it into a cave of its own. Leveraging the persistence of vision, these “dark experiences” create an astonishing visual effect as ghostly afterimages of the cave and Matsunaga linger onscreen. Through these interventions, Gama challenges the notion that visibility equals understanding. It considers the ethics of revealing these hallowed places before the camera, just as Matsunaga informs tourists of the need to respect the bones remaining in the gama, which are threatened by the construction of military bases.
From Island to Island (Lau Kek-huat, 2024).
Titled after a book by Ng Kim Chew, Lau Kek-huat’s five-hour From Island to Island (2024) shows that some tours can connect people in ways that disrupt dominant historical narratives. It’s a massive, harrowing exegesis of Taiwanese participation in the Imperial Japanese Army, and their complicity (whether forced or willing) in Japanese war crimes during World War II, particularly the widespread massacres of Chinese civilians in Southeast Asia. The film also follows the diaspora of Taiwanese people in Southeast Asia, many of whom were incarcerated in wartime internment camps. As the title suggests, it moves fluidly between islands, from Taiwan to Japan, the Malay Peninsula, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, and many smaller islands and non-island locales.
In Taiwan, where nostalgia for the Japanese colonial period remains strong for some, such as the former soldiers interviewed in the film, and in Lau’s native Malaysia, where certain topics related to World War II are outright censored, the film’s subject matter is already contentious. But Lau makes his most daring move in the final third of the film by questioning the foundations of postwar memory culture in Japan. Disturbed by the silences in official histories in Taiwan and Malaysia, Lau travels to Hiroshima, where he seems to find the opposite: a city steeped in remembrance. But while Japanese atomic bomb victims are given respect, he finds little mention of Taiwan’s colonization, let alone the massacres in Southeast Asia. Japan’s culture of memory is portrayed as highly selective, used to claim an exclusive victimhood and downplay its imperialism.
Lau meets some Japanese people who reject this paradigm. They are descendants of imperial soldiers who arrange “peace tours” to meet the victims of their ancestors’ atrocities face to face. They do not assume they can secure reconciliation in the course of these tours, and they are aware of the harm they could cause as interlopers and outsiders. They may not be able to atone for crimes they didn’t commit, but they feel a sense of duty to contact those victims who are still alive, to listen deeply, and to be discomforted. Near the end of the film, a moving conversation occurs between a young Japanese woman—a translator on the film production—and an elderly Japanese man who has been on these peace tours many times. She wonders how she could ask her own family about what they did during the war without them becoming defensive. The man proposes starting with a simple request: “You can say, ‘Grandpa, I’m here because you survived.… How did you survive? What struggles did you experience?’” For the old man, the question of why we are alive (and others are not) is deeply tied to our obligations to responsibly represent the past. In these interactions, Lau finally finds what he has been searching for: a way of assembling history which leaves no one behind.
Nargis: When Time Stopped Breathing (The Maw Naing and Pe Maung Same, 2009).
TIDF’s expansive 26-film Focus Program on Myanmar, including both new and retrospective titles, highlighted a country without a strong presence at international film festivals. As a tie-in with this program, festival guests were offered the opportunity to tour Taipei’s Huaxin Street, which houses many Burmese Chinese immigrants and is known as “Little Burma.” The festival was clearly thinking about its own footprint on the city, and how to draw out the links between Taiwan and Myanmar in a way that gave this underrepresented community a more meaningful presence. I was concerned it would be a surface-level affair, but our guide, Analeigh Yao, had worked extensively on cultural programming by and for Southeast Asian migrant workers in Taiwan, and is part of Mingalapar Culture Studio, which publishes a zine and podcast about the Burmese community. Her insights into Little Burma, and into the nuances of a country most people only know of because it is in the midst of a civil war, increased my appreciation of the films.
Myanmar’s documentary scene originated in the first years of this century, when filmmakers and researchers based primarily in the Czech Republic led documentary workshops in Yangon with the hopes of fostering film education in a country where media had been tightly controlled by a dictatorial junta since the 1960s. Another important catalyst came in 2007, with the Saffron Revolution against the junta’s rule, and then in 2008, with Cyclone Nargis’s devastation. The earliest film in the Myanmar program, Nargis: When Time Stopped Breathing (2009), was made by a group from the then nascent Yangon Film School (YFS). The filmmakers embedded with monks engaged in relief efforts to see the destruction along the Ayeyarwady Delta, which the government had covered up. It’s a brutal watch, with scenes out of a waking nightmare: villages reduced to nothing, shell-shocked children talking about losing entire families, rivers choked with bloated, floating bodies. Some NGOs estimate Nargis’s death toll to be over 130,000.
Thaiddhi and Thu Thu Shein, co-founders of the Wathann Film Festival in Yangon, spoke about their work as camera operators on the film’s mentally taxing production. They noted that the chaos caused by Nargis was used to push through a constitutional referendum that increased the military’s power. Though military rule ended in 2011 as a result of reforms instituted by that referendum, Thaiddhi cited it as having laid the groundwork for the Tatmadaw to come back to power in the 2021 coup. At the moment when Myanmar filmmakers were just starting to document their country’s reality, they were witnessing the beginning of a string of events that would result in their freedoms being curtailed once again.
Riffing off the subtitle of Nargis, a panel discussion, “When Time Starts Breathing: Documentary in Today’s Myanmar,” gathered a cross-section of guests from the country’s documentary scene to share how they’ve continued to make and circulate films. People may remain anonymous, political themes are approached obliquely or experimentally, conscription is a looming threat, and safety is much more of a priority. But institutions like YFS still face the challenges they always have: getting young people interested in film, especially those from minority ethnic groups (there are 135 officially recognized groups in Myanmar). The important thing, as producer Lin Sun Oo stated, is to reject the “colonizer’s mindset.” YFS believes that their students know what is best for their communities and that they must be trained to teach others. To that end, they advance a docufictional approach in their curriculum, through which students film fictionalized stories with nonactors in real locations. Their pedagogy grounds cinema in the real problems people face, while providing space to imagine what a different world might look like.
The Clinic (Midi Z, 2023).
Midi Z has been the highest-profile representative of the cinema of Myanmar for some time, serving as a bridge between Taiwan, where he’s based, and Myanmar, where he was born. His oeuvre blurs documentary and fiction, and The Clinic (2023), his latest film (and the first to be released since the coup), is no different. It manages to convey not only the ethos of the YFS but also that of the entire Myanmar program, and perhaps of this year’s edition of TIDF in general. In an unassuming Yangon clinic, doctors Aung Min and San San Oo treat those who wander into their cluttered waiting room with a curt but attentive bedside manner somewhere between exasperation and tough love. San San Oo is a painter, and Aung Min makes films. Their creative pursuits are not divorced from their medical practice: the former uses painting as art therapy for mentally ill patients, and the latter draws inspiration for his films from the people who pass through the clinic, using filmmaking to diagnose, and maybe heal, society’s maladies.
The film does not reveal this, allowing audiences to observe him without preconceptions, but Aung Min is a respected filmmaker in Myanmar who teaches film independently and with the YFS. The Clinic borrows its title from a 2010 docufiction short by Aung Min, about his own work as a doctor, and the first part of The Clinic (separated from the rest of the film by a title card) is almost a remake of that earlier film. Midi Z interpolates Aung Min’s other films into his own, and we see Aung Min in production on another film that uses the clinic as a location, which touches on the struggles of Rohingya in Burmese society. The Clinic is, in effect, a docufiction about a man who makes docufiction films. This melding of Aung Min’s and Midi Z’s styles make it impossible to pick apart the many layers of reality and fiction. Instead of conceptualizing docufiction as a blend of discrete elements, the film constructs a totally new existence that seems to lie beyond factuality or artifice—one that speaks to how people live and dream of hope under the threat of state brutality and counterinsurgency. It is an impassioned salute from the diaspora in Taiwan all the way to unsung filmmakers in Myanmar, left out of the “international film community” by choice or circumstance.
The Clinic shouldered the festival’s curatorial throughlines: exchanges between Taiwan and Southeast Asia, cinema from rural and developing regions, how filmmakers can give back to the places they film, and what it means to represent people who exceed conceptions of national and international belonging. After being pessimistic about so many festivals’ detachment from urgent political issues, what I saw and experienced at TIDF—which lives up to Ogawa and Tahimik’s manifesto—was restorative and gave me much-needed hope. Instead of shrinking our world, TIDF demonstrated a commitment to making it more capacious for everyone.
- For more information on When Night Falls and Ying Liang, read his 2012 statement, “Nothing About Cinema, Everything About Freedom.” ↩
- Samera Esmeir, “On Becoming Less of the World,” History of the Present, 8 no. 1 (April 2018), 88–116. Emphasis added. ↩
- Dennis Lo, (2020). The Authorship of Place: A Cultural Geography of the New Chinese Cinemas, (Hong Kong University Press, 2020). ↩
- Literally translated as “rivers and lakes,” jianghu refers to a mystical, covert world of colorful characters who escape the direct control of law enforcement and government, usually used in the context of fantasy and martial-arts genres. For a consideration of the Chinese independent documentary community as a “digital jianghu,” see J.P. Sniadecki’s 2013 dissertation. ↩