Abstract

Ontogenetic Diversity: Rewriting China and the Sinophone through Independent Cinemas

Independent cinemas from China in the past two decades have been the focus of many international film festivals as well as cinema and media scholars. In these works, filmmakers seek to address and negotiate challenging conditions, conflicting affects and opinions, as well as precarious living experiences. In my lecture, I will offer an introduction to Sinophone (communities that are constantly under the pressures of their relationships with China and Chineseness) with three case studies: the cinema of the Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden, the post-2019 work of the Hong Kong independent director Chan Tze-woon, and the films of the Uyghur filmmaker in exile Tawfiq Nizamidin. I see Sinophone independent cinemas not as ontologically grounded in Chineseness. Rather, they are best understood as ontogenetically diverse and interdependently related ecologies and practices that actively rewrite those sociopolitical relationalities that constitute how we imagine China and the Sinophone.

Bio note

Victor Fan is Reader in Film and Media Philosophy at the Department of Film Studies, King’s College London and a film festival consultant. Fan graduated with a Ph.D. from the Film Studies Program and the Comparative Literature Department of Yale University, and an MFA in Film and Television Productions at School of Cinema-Television, University of Southern California. He is the author of Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), Extraterritoriality: Locating Hong Kong Cinema and Media (Edinburg University Press, 2019), and Cinema Illuminating Reality: Media Philosophy through Buddhism (University of Minnesota Press, 2022). His film The Well was an official selection of the São Paolo International Film Festival. He has worked with the British Film Institute, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Chinese Visual Festival (UK), Five Flavours Film Festival (Warsaw), London East Asia Film Festival, Queer East (UK), and the Singapore International Film Festival.