南天海角獅子山前: 浸會大學歷史刊物
O Southern Sea, O Lion Hill:
HKBU Historical Publications

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
DOCUMENTARY FILM:
REGIONAL,
THEORETICAL& POLITICAL
PARAMETERS
25-27 JUNE,2018
Organized by:
팜
主辦機構：
香港浸會大學
HONG KONG BAPTIST UNIVERSITY
傳理學院
ol of Communication
浸大電影學院
academy of
of film hkbu
電務興社振劃像
日
研究中心
f/ir
Cetern Moing hage
Research

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
DOCUMENTARY FILM:
REGIONAL,
THEORETICAL&
POLITICAL
PARAMETERS
25-27 JUNE,2018
Date:25-27 June 2018 (Mon-Wed)
Time:Day 1:9:30am-5:10pm,
Day 2:9:30am-4:40pm,
Day 3:9:30am-4:40pm
Conference Venue: CVA1022, Communication and Visual Arts
Building, HKBU,5, Hereford Road, Kowloon Tong,HK.
Screening Venue:CVA104, Communication and Visual Arts Building,
HKBU, 5, Hereford Road, Kowloon Tong, HK.
3

Nature of Conference
Theme, Aims &
Objectives
This conference is sponsored by the School of Communication and will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the
School of Communication. It is, therefore, presented as a prestige event, which will further enhance the reputation
of the School,and,through that, the University. The conference also aims to make a major contribution to the
field of documentary film studies,by exploring the documentary film in Hong Kong and the region, and by
engaging with emerging and increasingly important theoretical paradigms related to the documentary film.
Consequently,the conference will consist of significant contributions on Hong Kong documentary film, East-Asian
documentary film, documentary film in China,recent involvement of the documentary film in political movements,
the colonial context of documentary film in the South-East Asian region, and theoretical paradigms involving
cinematic realism, phenomenology, authorial engagement, gender and affect. The conference will thereby seek
to link together general theoretical issues debated world-wide with issues affecting Hong Kong and the region,
engendering new synergies and collaborations in the process, which will also be on-going. One of the prime
objectives of the conference,therefore, will be to act as a platform and developmental structure for these new and
on-going relationships. The conference will also aim to be inter-disciplinary, and will encompass history, colonial
studies, area studies,film studies, television studies and cultural studies. To these ends also,the conference will
seek to provide contributions by some of the leading international scholars in the field. In addition to this over-
riding academic orientation, however, the conference will also provide a much-needed platform for documentary
film-makers in Hong Kong to discuss issues of importance to them, and engage in collaborative projects. Another
objective of the conference will be to enhance the overall profile of the Academy of Film, and, through that,the
University. In addition to on-going collaboration, a final objective of the conference will be to produce an edited
anthology of papers published by an international academic press.
The focus of the conference on Hong Kong,the South-East Asia region, China and international documentary film
theory contributes towards the University's research foci on Cross-Cultural Studies and China Studies.
4

Conference Chair
·Prof. lan Aitken
·Academy of Film
·School of Communication
·HK Baptist University
Panel Chairs
·Prof. lan Aitken,Professor,Academy of Film, COMM,HKBU
·Dr. Chao Shi Yan, Research Assistant Professor,Academy of Film, COMM, HKBU
·Dr. Choi Jung Bong,Associate Professor, Academy of Film,COMM,HKBU
·Dr.Dorothy Lau,Lecturer,Academy of Film, COMM, HKBU
·Dr.Lo Wai Luk, Associate Professor, Academy of Film, COMM,HKBU
·Dr.Kenny Ng, Associate Professor,Academy of Film, COMM, HKBU
Welcoming Remarks
by Prof. Eva Man, Chair Professor in Humanities, Director of the Academy
of Film COMM HKBU
Area of Interests
Comparative Aesthetics / Neo-Confucian Philosophy / Feminist
Aesthetics and Philosophy/ Gender Studies /Cultural Studies
5

善衡校園
香港浸會大學
HO SIN HANG CAMPUS
HONG KONG BAPTIST UNIVERSITY
(HSHC)
音樂室
區樹洪平台花園
Music
Au Shue Hung
Rehearsal
Terrace
Garden
Hall
區樹洪樓
Au Shue Hung
北
Building(ASH)*
大學會堂
N
Academic
Community Hall(ACH)
星島樓
Broadcast Drive
吕明才中心
Sing Tao
Lui Ming Choi
Building(S
Centre(LMC)
基督教
教育中心
ristian
Christia
Education Centre(CEC)
（西翼）
溫仁才大樓（主樓）（OEM）
（東翼）
Oen Hall
Oen Hall Building(M
Oen Hall
16
Building
Building
Podium
平台
(East Wing)
紹邦樓
廣播道
(West
蒙民偉廣場
Yeung Shui Sar
ng Shui Sang Building(YSS)
Chuk Yuen Road 竹園道
(Level 6)
（六樓）
(OEE)
Shiu Pon
iu Pong Hall(SPH)
Wing)
(OEW)
查濟民科學大樓
Cha Chi-ming Science Tower(SCT)
楊瑞生紀念館
William M.W.Mong Courtyard
平台Podium（五樓 Level 5）
方樹泉圖書館／方樹泉停車場
*
邵逸夫大樓
Fong Shu Chuen Library(FSC)/Fong Shu Chuen Car Park
Sir Run Run Shaw
Building(RRS)
文農學圃
往樂富港鐵站
Man Lung Garden
To Lok Fu MTR Station
偉衡體育中心
建新中心
Wai Hang
聯合道
Franki Centre(FC)
Sports Centre
金城道
持續教育學院
(WHS)
Kam Shing Road
總辦事處
（位於二楼）
Junction Road
SCE
Headquarters
(Located on
on 2/F)
逸夫校園
BUS
85
SHAW CAMPUS
72,
73,
72,73,85
(SC)
Junction Road
聯合道
逸夫行政樓
25M,29A,72,85
Shaw Tower (SWT)
區樹洪紀念圖書館
Au Sh
hue Hung
Memorial Library (AML)
聯校運動中心
Joint Sports Centre(JSC)
Legend 函
永隆銀行商學大樓
The Wing Lung
Bank Buildin
uilding
for Business Studies(WLB)
行人出入口
Pedestrian Entrance/Exit
林護國際會議中心
Lam Woo
International
往
車輛出入口
ce Centre
C
九龍塘
港鐵站
Vehicular Entrance/Exit
思齊樓
David C.Lam
To
Building (DLB)
BUS
公共巴士站
Kowloon
Tong
Bus Stop
郭鐘寶芬女士康體文娛中心
ITR Station
停車場B出入口
Baptist University
Madam Kw
Bo Fun
25M(s)
Car Park B
Sports and Cultural Centre(SCC)
公共小巴站
教學及行政大樓
Public Light Bus Stop
停車場C人 Entrance
Academic and Administration Building
Baptist University Road
賽馬會師生活動中心／陳瑞槐夫人
往
港鐵站
胡尹桂女士持續教育大樓
丕
Jockey Club Academic
九龍塘
MTR Station
C
nity Centre(ACC)/Madam
Chan Wu Wan Kwai School of
（沙福道）
Continuing Education Tower(SCE)
公共交通
＊此兩座大樓的房間編號
25M(S)
賽馬會中醫藥學院大樓
交匯處
英文字首均為AST
of Ch
Chinese Medicine Building(SCM)
Jockey Club School
To
A common room code
Kowloon
學生宿舍
Tong
AST is adopted to all the
浸會大學道校園
Student Residence Halls(SRH)
(Suffolk Roac
rooms in these two buildings
BAPTIST UNIVERSITY
Public
Car Park C Exit
停車場C出口
ROAD CAMPUS
Transport
Intercha
(BURC)
25M,25M(s),
29A,29B,61M
傳理視藝大樓／傳理視藝停車場
Co
nication and Visual Arts
Building(CVA)/Communication
and Visual Arts Car Park
Hereford Road禧福道
July 2016
Green Zoon on the campus map-
Baptist University Road Campus (BURC): 1. Dr. Ng Tor Tai International
House (NTT), 2.Communication and Visual Arts Building (CVA)
6
會大學道
聯福道
Renfrew Road
窩打老道
Waterloo Road

Day
1
09:30:
Registration & Tea Reception
10:00-10:05:
Welcoming Introduction
by Prof.Eva Man Director of the Academy of Film
10:05-10:10:
Group photo
Panel 1: HK Documentary Film
1010-1250
Chair:Dr. Lo Wai Luk (HKBU)
Speakers:(25mins reserved for each speaker)
1
Ms.Angelina Chen (Independent Filmmaker)
1010-1035
Ms.Tammy Cheung (Independent Filmmaker)
1035-1100
3
Ms.Lo Yan Wai Connie (Documentary Film Director)
1100-1125
4
Dr. Kenny Ng (HKBU)
1125-1150
5
Dr.Winnie Yee (The University of HK)
1150-1215
Q&A (35mins)
1215-1250
Lunch Break
1250-1430
Panel 2: East Asian Documentary Film
1430-1710
Chair:Dr. Choi Jung Bong (HKBU)
Speakers:(25mins reserved for each speaker)
1
Dr. Kerim Friedman (National Dong Hwa University,Taiwan)
1430-1455
2
Dr.Kim Jihoon(Chung-ang University,South Korea)
1455-1520
3
Dr. Ma Ran (Nagoya University, Japan)
1520-1545
4
Prof.Markus Nornes (University of Michigan, USA)
1545-1610
5
Prof. Akiyama Tamako (Rikkyo University, Japan)
1610-1635
Q &A (35mins)
1635-1710
Refreshment in CVA103
from 1710
Screening: All are welcome
1730-2000
Free Screening: "Raise the Umbrellas”-Dr. Evans Chan
Advance Registration Required: fmiresearch@hkbu.edu.hk
7

Day
2
09:00:
Morning Tea Reception
Panel 1: Documentary Filmn in China
0930-1210
Chair:Dr. Kenny Ng (HKBU)
Speakers:(25mins reserved for each speaker)
1
Dr. Chao Shi Yan(HKBU)
0930-0955
2 Dr. Gao Qian (Transylvania University, USA)
0955-1020
3 Dr. Xu Yaping Apple (China University of Political Science and Law)
1020-1045
4 Dr. Jessica Yeung (HKBU)
1045-1110
5 Dr. Zhang Zhen (New York University, USA)
1100-1135
Q&A(35mins)
1135-1210
Lunch Break
1210-1400
Panel 2: Documentary Film and the protest movements-
1400-1640
Chair : Dr. Chao Shi Yan (HKBU)
Speakers: (25mins reserved for each speaker)
1 Dr. Evans Chan (Critic and Filmmaker)
1400-1425
2
Ms. Bonnie Chiu (HKBU)
1425-1550
3
Prof.Gina Marchetti (The University of HK)
1450-1515
4 Dr. Judith Pernin (French School of Asian Studies,EFEO)
1515-1540
5 Prof. Carlos Rojas (Duke University,USA)
1540-1605
Q&A (35mins)
1605-1640
Refreshment in CVA103
from 1640
Screening:All are welcome
1730-2030
Free Screening: "Vanished Archives”-Ms.Lo Yan Wai Connie
Advance Registration Required: fmiresearch@hkbu.edu.hk
8

Day
3
09:00:
Morning Tea Reception
Panel 1:Colonial Documentary Film
0930-1210
Chair :Prof. lan Aitken (HKBU)
Speakers: (25mins reserved for each speaker)
1
Prof.Tim Barnard (National University of Singapore)
0930-0955
2
Prof.Peter Bloom (University of California Santa Barbara, USA)
0955-1020
3
Dr. Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes (University of Cambridge,UK)
1020-1045
4
Dr.Sandeep Ray (Singapore University of Technology and Design)
1045-1110
5
Dr.Tom Rice (University of St. Andrews Scotland, Scotland)
1110-1135
Q&A (35mins)
1135-1210
Lunch Break
1210-1400
Panel 2: Theoretical issues:phenomenology and film
1400-1640
Chair:Dr. Dorothy Lau (HKBU)
Speakers:(25mins reserved for each speaker)
1
Dr.Jenny Chamarette (Queen Mary University of London,UK)
1400-1425
2
Dr. Tiago de Luca (University of Warwick, UK)
1425-1450
3
Dr. Steven Eastwood (Queen Mary University of London, UK)
1450-1515
4
Dr. Cecilia Mello (University of São Paulo, Brazil)
1515-1540
5
Dr. Richard Rushton (Lancaster University, UK)
1540-1605
Q&A (35mins)
1605-1640
Refreshment in CVA103
from 1640
Private Screening
1730-2000
Private Screening: "Island”-Dr.Steven Eastwood
Advance Registration Required:fmiresearch@hkbu.edu.hk
9
7
7

DOCUMENTARY FILM:
REGIONAL,
THEORETICAL& POLITICAL
PARAMETERS
25-27 June 2018
日期：
Time 時間：
n-5:10p
Day
om
wd o
Day 2:9:30am-
Day 3:9:30am-4:40 pm
Conference Venue:
CVA1022, Communication and
Visual Arts Building, HKBU, 5,
Hereford Road,Kowloon Tong, HK.
會議地點：香港九龍塘禧福道5號浸會大學
傳理視藝大樓1022室
e:
cation and
Visual Arts Building,HKBU,5,Hereford Road,
Kowloon Tong, HK.
電影放映地點：
5號浸會大學傳理視藝大樓104室
Enquiries:fmiresearch@hkbu.edu.hk
Registration Fee:HK$100 per day
ilm (10:10-12:500pm
Day 1
Panel 1:HK Documentar
(u
H
Panel 2:East Asian Documentary Film(2:30-5:10pn

Day
Panel 1: HK Documentary Film
1010-1250
Chair
Dr.Lo Wai Luk, Associate Professor, Academy of Film, COMM, HKBU
Area of Interests
History of Chinese Cinema / Aesthetics of Chinese films / Theatre
Aesthetics/Hong Kong Performance Studies
11

Ms. Angelina Chen
Independent Filmmaker
Biographical note
Angie Chen was born in Shanghai in 1949 and went to school in Taiwan. She then studied at the University of
lowNa, obtaining Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Communication. Working in film and television in the U.S.
after graduation, she also studied at UCLA, graduating with a Master's degree in film. After directing the short
Der Besuch (1979), which won an award at the Toronto Super 8 Film Festival, she worked on Liu Chiachang's
The Flag (1981), after which she entered the Hong Kong film industry, serving as assistant director on such
films as Jackie Chan's Dragon Lord (1982).
Eager to direct, Chen approached Shaw Brothers executive Mona Fong and was given the opportunities to
direct May Be It's Love (1984) and My Name Ain't Suzie (1985), the latter winning Best Supporting Actress (for
Deanie Ip) at the Hong Kong Film Awards(1986).
After finishing Chaos by Design (1988),Chen decided to focus on making commercials, enjoying a successful
career in that field.
After an absence of 20 years, Chen resumed making featurelength films, directing the documentaries This
Darling Life (2008), which was nominated for Best documentary by the Goldne Horse Awards, and One
Tree Three Lives (2012),which premiered at the Hong Kong International Film Festival and was later named
Recommended Film by the Hong Kong Film Critics Society.
12
Panel 1·Day 1

Ms. Tammy Cheung
Independent Filmmaker
Biographical note
Tammy Cheung is a Hong Kong documentary filmmaker.
Cheung was born in Shanghai, China. Her family moved to Hong Kong, where Cheung grew up. She
later went to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, to study film at Concordia University[3] in the mid 1980s.
In 1999, she made her first documentary film, Invisible Women,which follows the lives of three Indian women
in Hong Kong. She is an admirer of the American filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, and uses the style of Direct
Cinema for her film.
In 2004, with other like-minded individuals from the fields of film, culture and education,Cheung founded
Visible Record, which distributes and promotes documentary films in Hong Kong. The non-profit organisation
also hosts the annual Chinese Documentary Festival. In the past decade, Cheung has been regarded as one of
the most respected documentary filmmakers in Hong Kong.
13
Day 1·Panel 1

Ms. Lo Yan Wai Connie
Documentary Film Director
How Patriotism Drives the 67 Riots?
（愛國主義如何推動六七暴動）
Biographical note
Over the past two decades, Lo has worked in different media groups including the TV Division of Radio
Television Hong Kong, the News and Public Affairs Department of Asia Television Limited, Fairchild TV in
Canada, and the News and Public Affairs Department of Television Broadcasts Limited. She has founded
Studio for Public Humanities Limited in 2012, with a focus on history documentation.
14
Panel 1·Day 1

Dr.Kenny Ng
HKBU
In the Mood for Change:
Chan Tze-woon■'s Mockumentary and Documentary
(Yellowing) of the 2014 Umbrella Movement
In pursuing a master's degree in film production in the Hong Kong Baptist University,Chan Tze-woon made
two short fims.wThe Aaueous Truth%(2013)and:Being Rain: Representation and Wi(2014)-mockumentary
works about state secrecy and conspiracy that were intended to challenge the lack of government
transparency and accountability in Hong Kong. It was in September 2014 that Chan took his camera to join
and film the protests of young students, achieving a 1000-hour footage of the Umbrella Movement,from
which he reworked his first documentary Yellowing (aka in Chinese Memo of the Troubled Times) (2016). This
paper discusses Chan's experimentations with the documentary/fiction hybrids, and explores the provocative
power of artifice and authenticity of documentary filmmaking in its truth-seeking mission. In "Being Rain" and
“The Aqueous Truth,"the authority has engaged in rainmaking in protest days and put a sedative chemical
into the drinking water to dampen the citizens' aggressive emotions and dissonance. The films involve
fictional enactments of events to confuse audience with a mixed sense of truth/untruth when the truth have
become increasingly difficult for public access in real social circumstances. In Yellowing, Chan forsakes the
grand storytelling of political and social interpretations (Chan had been a student of political science in City
University of Hong Kong prior to joining Baptist University's film training), and shuns interviewing political
activists or political celebrities with international media attentions. His camera revolves around the young
crowds and a group of committed rebels as individuals with a collegiality spirit, catching unawares their
spontaneous responses and desires, idealisms and passions, hopes and fears,frustrations and contradictions,
from a bird's-eye view. In this sense, the documentary,like a good historical film, can express the cultural-
historical sensibilities of the milieu as it features how the people experience the events at pedestrian levels.
Biographical note
Kenny K.K. Ng is Associate Professor at the Academy of Film of Baptist University,Hong Kong. His book,Li
Jieren,Geopoetic Memory,and the Crisis of Writing Chengdu in Revolutionary China was published by Brill in
2015.His ongoinng book projects include censorship and visual cultural politics in Cold War China and Asia, and
Hong Kong-based historical and transnational developments of Cantonese and Mandarin cinemas.
15
Day 1·Panel 1

Dr.Winnie Yee
The University of HK
In Search of the Disappearing
Rhymes: Topographical Writings in
Three Hong Kong Documentary Films
In light of the growing problems of urban development, rural exploitation and identity crisis in Hong Kong,the
ethical debates that have characterized environmental studies in the West have become increasingly relevant
in the East. As a contribution to this rich scholarship, this paper examines the negotiation between urban and
rural contexts in documentary films as a way to critique the de-historicization of cultural roots, to establish
subjectivity, and to rebuild communal ties through a harmonious relationship with the rural. This discussion
seeks to discover how the experimental works of Hong Kong documentary filmmakers link the trivial and the
mundane with macro events and structures, and to chart the writing of our relationship with the rural and
nature as a renegotiation of the urban and the rural contexts of Hong Kong today.
Folk songs, land and water represent a liberating force and critical challenge to the current capitalist logics.In
Chi-hang Ma's Ballad on the Shore (2017), songs and water link the marginalized boat people to Hong Kong's
city space, thus reviving lost memories and communal ties.In Flowing Stories (2014), Jessey Tsang returns
to her home village in Ho Chung, a suburban area of Hong Kong, to trace the diasporic experiences of three
generations of Hong Kong villagers. The river that runs through the village bears witness to the perpetual
departure and return of villagers in critical moments of history and serves to critique people's indifference to
the consequences of urban development. Rhymes of Shui Hau (2017) is a documentary about folk songs sung
by three grannies from Shui Hau village, a small village located in southern Lantau Island. Fredie Ho-lun Chan
depicts the stories of grannies not to provoke sympathy or to create a spectacle, but to register a broader
way of understanding our relationship with disappearing culture, our cultural identities reflected in moments
of crisis,and a history that is beyond capitalistic logic. Their innovative adaptation of documentaries serves as
means of fostering alternative visions that illuminate our understanding of the dynamic between nature and
culture,our tangible and intangible heritage,and biological and cultural diversity in the midst of the waves
of globalization. Folk songs, land and water act as powerfuil tropes, allowing the three young documentary
filmmakers to write a history of the quotidian, which is often neglected.
Biographical note
Winnie L M Yee is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature and Programme Coordinator of MA in Literary
and Cultural Studies at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests are eco-criticism, Hong Kong
independent cinema,contemporary Chinese literature and film,and Asian cinema. Her work has appeared in
Environment Space Place, Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, Jump Cut, among other places. She is currently
working on a book project exploring the relationship between ecopoetics and Chinese independent film scene,
and an edited volume on Asian Ecocinema.
16
Panel 1·Day 1

Day
1
Panel 2: East Asian Documentary Film
1430-1710
Chair
Dr. Choi Jung Bong,Associate Professor,Academy of Film, COMM,HKBU
Area of Interests
Media,Film and Popular Cultures in East Asia /Political Economy of
Digital Television and Technologies / Critical / Cultural Theories of
Nation, Regionalization and Globalism
17

Dr. P.Kerim Friedman
National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan
Chronotopes of Indigeneity in
Taiwanese Documentary Film
Since the Nineties
A paper to be presented on the panel “East Asian Documentary Film" at the 2018 conference on "Documentary
Film,Regional, Theoretical and Political Parameters" to be held at Hong Kong Baptist University. June 25-27,
2018.
Taking a semiotic approach inspired by the work of scholars like Michael Silverstein and WJT Mitchell, this
paper explores the shifting spacio-temporal scales indexed by representations of Taiwan's indigenous peoples
in over fifty documentary and ethnographic films. Drawing on the archives of the Taiwan International
Ethnographic Film Festival (TIEFF), founded in 2001 and featuring films made since the late nineties,this
paper explores documentary films by or about Taiwan's indigenous peoples. It argues that these films can be
grouped into three overarching Bakhtinian chronotopes, each of which uses indigenous identities to highlight
different relations between Taiwan's past, present, and future, as wvell as different spatial relations following
from those choices. The first highlights the continuity between ancient Austronesian culture and the present.
The second highlights the Japanese colonial encounter with indigenous peoples. And the third focuses on
encounters between indigenous people and the modern Taiwanese state. Combining close readings of each
film with supplementary texts (such as the festival catalog, reviews, and published work by or about the
directors), and interviews with the filmmakers, this paper asks the following questions:What kind of indexical
variation exists within each of the identified chronotopes?
How have the subject positions of the films directors shaped the representation of indigenous identities? And
how have filmmakers attempted to challenge or break out of these chronotopes? In answering these questions
this paper seeks to locate the indexicality of indigenous identities as presented in these films within a wider
political economic framework.
Biographical note
P. Kerim Friedman is an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National
Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous
Taiwanese,looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity,and political economy.An
ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, 'Please Don't Beat
Me, Sir!' about a street theater troupe from one of India's Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs). Kerim is
also a co-founder of the anthropology blog anthro{dendum} (formerly Savage Minds).
18
Panel 2·Day 1

Dr. Kim Jihoon
Chung-ang University, South Korea
Post-vérité Turns: Korean
Independent Documentary
in the 21st Century
Despite the obvious paucity of existing English-written works on it in Korean cinema and media studies,
Korean independent documentary in the 21st century has been the richest and most vibrant territory of formal
and aesthetic experimentations in Korean national cinema as many filmmakers and artists have attempted to
renew and transcend its traditional ethos of cinéma vérité. Emerging directors and moving image artists have
developed an array of other formal devices than those in the participatory mode of documentary,including self-
reflexive and essayistic approaches, reenactment, archival uses of found footage, and poetic observation.These
devices have resulted in various films, videos, and installations that could fall under the rubric of 'experimental
documentary' or 'avant-doc.' The new filmmakers and artists' growing attempts at intersecting documentary
and avant-garde cinema,and documentary and contemporary art,however,do not mark a total departure from
their predecessors. Thne works in question might break from the authentic assumptions of the traditional Korean
independent documentary, but their directors and artists ultimately aim at extending its traditional subjects,
political responsibility,and ethical or epistemological problems intotheir formal experimentations. It is in this
sense that thne works are seen to mark the 'post-vérité' turn of Korean independent documentary.
This paper presents an overview of my in-progress project entitled Post-vérité Turns: Korean Independent
Documentary in the 21st Century, classifying the aesthetic,technical, and political changes in the Korean
independent documentary since the 2000s as five 'turns': namely, 'the personal turn,' the audiovisual turn,' 'the
archival turn,' 'the digital turn,'and finally, 'the crossover turn.' All these categories demonstrate that the new
post-vérité' documentary film in the 21st century has also updated the activist tradition's political and ethical
commitment to Korean society and history by cultivating the alternative public sphere in which both the traumas of
modernization and the new problems of the neoliberalized contemporary Korea have been portrayed and discussed.
Biographical note
Jihoon Kim is associate professor of cinema and media studies at Chung-ang University, South Korea. He is
the author of Between Film, Video,and the Digital: Hybrid Moving Images in the Post-media Age (New York:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). His essays on film theory,experimental film and video, art of the moving image,
cinema and contemporary art,digital cinema,and experimental documentary have appeared in Screen,
Film Quarterly, Camera Obscura, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Millennium Film Journal, Leonardo
Electronic Almanac, and the anthologies Global Art Cinema: New Histories and Theories (Oxford University
Press, 2010), and Taking Place:Location and the Moving Image (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), among
others. Currently He is working on two book projects,each entitled Documentary's Expanded Fields: New
Media, New Platforms, and the Documentary and Post-vérité Turns: Korean Independent Documentary in the
21st Century respectively.
19
Day 1·Panel 2

Dr. Ma Ran
Nagoya University, Japan
Home-coming Myanmar: Midi Z
(Zhao Deyin)'s Migration Machine
and Precarious Filmmaking
The border-crossing oeuvre by Taipei-based, Burmese-Chinese auteur Midi Z (Zhao Deyin), particularly his
'Homecoming Trilogy' (guixiang sanbuqu),consisting of three digital features inspired by the filmmaker's
own transborder experience between Myanmar, Thailand,and Taiwan,provides fascinating case studies to
understand the translocal,transnational dynamics of diasporic Sinophone cinema fromn Asia. Following his
acclaimed Trilogy, Midi accomplished two documentaries,Jade Miners (wayushi deren, 2015) and City of Jade
(feicui zhicheng,2016),both of which were shot roughly during the similar period at the 'Jade City',namely
Hpakant at Kachin State in northern Myanmar, (in)famously known for its valuable jade resources. Narrated
in the filmmaker's voice-over in Yunnan dialect, City of Jade stands out as a first-person film. This study first
illustrates how the City of Jade can be better understood in relation to Midi's fictional Trilogy. Both strands
of 'home-coming' projects have foregrounded the precarious condition of the diasporic subjects, whose
migrating movement (internal and external) intersects the wild, dangerous, and unpredictable strategies of
'Chinese transnationalism' (Ong and Nonini) with the translocal informal economy networks in contemporary
Asia. Second, Midi's first-person style is minimalist and 'weak'. His self-representation is mostly limited to
voice-over,and the filmmaker has deployed hardly any archival materials or video footages to (re)construct
the family history. It can be argued that the exploration of subjectivity in the documentary has instead shifted
focus onto Midi's brother De-Chin in relation to the (migrant) laborers' fraught statuses at the mining pit.
As such,the documentary constitutes a potential public record for the displaced, disenfranchised subjects
like De-Chin, whose precarity questions the very teleological narrative about Myanmar's contemporary
transformations toward progress and democracy,and interrogates the 'fluid, global,and liquid powers'of
neoliberal globalization.
Biographical note
MA Ran currently teaches at the Global-30 "Japan-in-Asia” Cultural Studies Program, Graduate School of
Humanities, Nagoya University,Japan. Her research interests include Asian independent cinemas and film
festival studies,for which topics she has published several journal articles and book chapters, including recent
contributions to Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation (2017),Taiwan Cinema: International Reception and
Social Change (2017), and "A Landscape Over There: Rethinking Translocality in Zhang Lu's Border Crossing
Films" for Verge: Studies in Global Asias (forthcoming). She is currently working on her book manuscript
tentatively titled Independent Filmmaking across Borders in Contemporary Asia.
20
Panel 2·Day 1

Prof. Markus Nornes
University of Michigan, USA
Shooting in the Grey Zone: the
Upside of Ethical Risk
This paper compares the documentary cinemas of China and Japan, and our sense that one is on the ascent while the
other declines. Why is it that the shift to digital led to suchdrastically different results? In China,the new independents
have forged a daring and powerful new documentary field; in contrast, the Japanese documentary scene seems to have
lost its way. Clearly there are political and economic reasons. However, this paper concentrates on the unlikely arena of
ethics. We tend think of documentary ethics in a binary way-a given work or filmmaker is ethical or unethical. In practice,
the terrain filmmakers navigate is far from black and white. Indeed, I will argue that there is a risky grey zone between the
safe and sinful, a sweet spot that the best documentaries in history often work within.I compare the work of Japanese
filmmakers Matsumoto Takako, Soda Kazuhiro and Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing and their films on mental illness. On one
end of the spectrum is Matsumoto's documentary on artist Kusama Yayoi, which is so meekly ensconced in the safety zone
that it threatens to make her spectacular subject surprisingly dull. On the other end of the spectrum is Wang Bing's film
on a mnental hospital, which boldly invades a mental hospital and repeatedly and unforgivably sidesteps patient consent
to convert the insane into art. A more impressive film would be made in the grey zone, where Soda works. Most Japanese
documentary filmmakers are so deeply afraid of ethical missteps that their work suffers, giving their entire field its senseof
decline.This paper argues that an important source of documentary's power as a form of filmmaking derives from traversing
the grey zone and grazing the vague border with the unethical without crossing over the the dark side.
Biographical note
Markus Nornes is a scholar of Asian cinema, and specializes in Japan, documentary and translation theory. Much of his work
has explored the history of Japanese documentary and its theoretical implications. He has also written about nonfiction
production in other parts of Asia. Nornes has also brought translation theory to bear on film studies. Nornes worked as a
programmer on the international film festival circuit. As a Coordinator at the Yamagata International Documentary Film
Festival;among the mnajor programs he co-programmed is Nichibei Eigasen: Media Wars-Then & Now (commemorating the
50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor,1991), In Our Own Eyes: First Nations' Film and Video Festival (1993), Den'ei Nanahenge:
Seven Transfigurations in Electric Shadows (for the cinema centenary, 1995). Nornes' research centers on the cinemas
of Asia, particularly the non-fiction form. His first book is a history of the first half-century of documentary in Japan. It
examines the emergence of documentary, its exploitation by left-wing movements, and ultimately its cooptation by the
government in waging war across Asia.He followed this up with a monograph following the life trajectory of director Ogawa
Shinsuke,whose collective had an indelible impact on both Japanese and Asian documentary. Nornes has also published
on Chinese-language documentary. His work is foremost concerned with the political and ethical complexities of producing
documentary at times of social tension or political crisis. Nornes also specializes in film translation. He has translated
subtitles for Japanese films and written a monograph on the subject. His other books include an analysis of City of Sadness
co-written with Emily Yueh-yu Yeh and the Research Guide to Japanese Cinema, co-written with Aaron Gerow. As an editor,
his volumes include books on Korean Hallyu,Pacific War cinema, and the pink film. This spring he is publishing a 700-page
reader in Japanese film theory,which he co-edited with Aaron Gerow and Iwamoto Kenji. He just completed a monograph
on calligraphy in East Asian cinema.
21
Day 1·Panel 2

Prof. Akiyama Tamako
Rikkyo University, Japan
Cultural Asylum: The Invisible
Fortress of Chinese Independent
Documentary
Since the establishment of the PRC in 1949, film and television was the domain of the state. But the first
documentary made by an individual appeared in early 1990s. From this unexpected starting point,an
independent documentary based on low-budget, low-technology production took root. It quickly expanded
into an alternative production and distribution sphere with the introduction of digital technologies in the
200Os. It then came to constitute a cohesive community of producers and viewers, alongside similar groups in
contemporary art and philosophy. This paper proposes the framework of "Cultural Asylum" to understand the
dynamics of non-official cultural production in societies like China.Rejecting stark binaries like dominance and
resistance,I explore the ways in which independent documentary conducts a serial collaboration with various
entities in both official and non-official sectors. This effectively creates a relatively safe "invisible fortress" for
experimental,creative work.
Biographical note
AKIYAMA Tamako（秋山珠子）teaches at University of Tokyo， Rikkyo University，and several leading universities
in Tokyo and is widely known for her scholarship on,and subtitling and interpretation of,Chinese language
cinema. She has been a close observer of Chinese thought, cinema and art since the 1990s. Supporting
these artists' efforts through writing, translation and interpretation, she has experienced their many turning
points together-helping to introduce the forefront of Chinese art and film to Japan. Hler many translations
include Zhang Yuan's Beijing Bastards (1993) and Crazy English (1999), Wang Bing's Tie Xi Qu: West of the
Tracks (2003) and Fengming: a Chinese Memoir (2007), Cong Feng's Dr. Ma's Country Clinic (2008) and Du
Haibing's A Young Patriot (2015). She has been invited as a speaker by many universities and film festivals
such as University of Michigan (USA),Fudan University (China), Hong Kong Baptist University (China), Pai
Chai University (Korea), Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival, Yamagata International Documentary
Film Festival,and the Osaka Asian Film Festival. She also has been awarded the Grant-in-Aid for Exploratory
Research from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) for the research into contemporary
Chinese documentary. She is currently writing a critical history of the independent Chinese documentary
scene.
22
Panel 2·Day 1

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32

DOCUMENTARY FILM:
REGIONAL,
THEORETICAL &
POLITICAL
PARAMETERS
25-27 June 2018
日期：2018年6月25-27日
Time 時間：
Day 1:9:30am-5:10 pm
Day
2:9:30am -4:40 pm
AO pm
Conference Venue
ication and
→
1
, HKBU,5,
Hereford Road, Kowloon Tong, HK.
會議地點：香港九龍塘禧福道5號浸會大學
傳理視藝大樓1022室
Enquiries:fmiresearch@hkbu.edu.hk
Screening Venue:
CVA104,Communication and
Kowloon Tong, HK.
電影放映地點：
香港九龍塘禧福道5號浸會大學傳理視藝大樓104室
Registration Fee: HK$100 per day
Day 2
Panel 1:Documentary Film in China(9:30-12:10pm)
Panel 2:Documentary Film and the protest movements (2:00-4:40pm)

Day
2
Panel 1: Documentary Film in China
0930-1210
Chair
Dr. Kenny Ng,Associate Professor, Academy of Film, COMM,HKBU
Area of Interests
Film Censorship /Film as Cultural Heritage /Visual and Urban Culture
Literature and Film Adaptation/ Historical Imagination and Cultural
Geography / Critical Theory and Aesthetics
34

Dr. Chao Shi Yan
HKBU
Chinese Queer Documentaries and
Lalas with DV Cameras
This paper provides an overview of queer independent documentary filmmaking in mainland China since the
turn of the century. It first identifies the key themes and characteristics of this queer documentary making
on its early stage in the context of the evolving New Documentary Movement (NDM).Secondly, it examines
what I call the "activist turn" of the queer documentary making during the years of 2007-2009. Crucial to this
activist turn is, alongside the endeavors of some individual agents (as in the larger NDM), the communal
and institutional impact, animated by, for instance, the ongoing queer film festivals (2001-),the emergence
of grassroots activism, and in particular the launch of the “Queer Comrades” (2007-) as China's only
independent, long running LGBT webcast that also sponsors some documentary filmmaking (2009-). Amidst
this activist turn and the institutional support, however,I would like to highlight the issue of gender inequality
in this; namely, local lesbian filmmakers and subjects somehow remain marginalized in the larger picture. It is
within this context that I would like to reappraise the significance of what I have termed "lesbians/lalas with
DV cameras" (2010). I would like use two more recent documentaries, Our Marriages: When Lesbians Marry
Gay Men (2013) and Xinjiang Girls (2018),by lesbian activist-filmmakers He Xiaopei and Shi Tou respectively,
to elaborate on my thesis and conclude my discussion.
Biographical note
Shi-Yan Chao is research assistant professor in the Academy of Film at Hong Kong Baptist University.He holds
a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies at New York University, and has taught classes at NYU and Columbia University.
Chao has published articles on Chinese-language film and media in anthologies (such as Chris Berry et al,The
New Chinese Documentary Film Movement) and academic journals (such as International Journal of Cultural
Policy [with Emilie Yeh], Reconstruction, Cinephile,and Transgender Studies Quarterly [forthcoming]). He is
now completing a book manuscript on Chinese queer cinemas.
35
Day 2·Panel 1

Dr. Gao Qian
Transylvania University, USA
The Weaving City-
The Story of My Town
This paper presents and examines social/political filmmaker Wang Yang's 2017 documentary film, "Weaving”,
winner of Best Director Award at The 2018 Moscow International Documentary Film Festival. The film isa close
study of two textile worker families during a fve year demolition process when their factory and residence
buildings were being torn down in a textile district called “the Weaving City" in Xi'an, China. With intimate
camera, the film successfully captures the intricate conflicts and tensions within the two families at the time of
conflicts. With such, it explores issues, both universal and Chinese particular, relating to traditional family, male
privilege,elderly care, filial piety,poverty and marginalized voices, all within the framework of change and loss
when ordinary people are thrown into social and economic changes in a post-modern world.
Biographical note
Dr. Gao Qian is Associate Professor of Chinese Language and Culture at Transylvania University. Her research
interests and publications are on modern and contemporary Chinese literature, film,popular culture, and
Chinese language pedagogy. Dr. Gao's most recent research projects include a book project on literature,film
and Internet representations of history, memory and modernity, and a new Chinese character dictionary with a
cognitive approach.
36
Panel 1·Day 2

Dr. Xu Yaping Apple
China University of Political Science and Law
The Documentary Editing Room of
Shanghai Television Station and its Oral
History Production on the Trauma of War
Premiered on February 1st of 1993, Documentary Editing Room (DER) was the first television column
exclusively producing and broadcasting documentary programs in the mainland China. This historical study
on DER finds that its launch was driven by both media workers' critical consciousness and autonomy on
engaging with the society that was affected by the media reforms,and the revival of mass culture in Shanghai.
Both causes are crystalized in the aesthetic of documentary realism (jishi) of DER that emphasizes the on-
the-spot observation and participation of the documentarian, and such aesthetic separates DER's historical
inquiries on the trauma of the Second World War from the former scripted style. Particularly in the case on
the 'Comfort Women' controversy (i.e. the sexual slavery of Japanese military in the Second World War),
documentary programs that investigate the war crime justice tend to use the oral history method to embody
the documentary relationship of rapport and equality,and to activate the contemporary spectator instead of
purely compiling history.
Biographical note
Dr.Xu Yaping is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the China University
of Political Science and Law (Beijing). Her research interests include documentary studies especially relating
to memory and testimony, visual cultural studies particularly in relation tothe urban-rural geography, critical
studies with the focus on the political economy of media, and German theories on modernity. She has been
recently conducting research on the political and economic issues of streaming video industry of China,
and directing research projects on the German visual-cultural theorists of the early twentieth century that is
funded by the Humanities and Social Science Foundation of the Ministry of Education of China.
37
Day 2·Panel 1

Dr. Jessica Yeung
HKBU
Environmental Awareness in Chinese
Documentaries
For more than a decade, enabled by the advance of digital camera technology, underground Chinese
documentaries have performed the function of investigative journalism in China where independent journalism
is nearly impossible. As a body of works they represent one of the most progressive voices of social critique
in the country. Many of these films cover topics of natural disasters and excessive development, often relating
environmentally destructive incidents to government policies. However, such concerns do not necessarily
manifest an altruistic anthropogenic awareness. On the contrary,regrets over the decline of the natural
environment could simply be anthropocentric expressions of anxiety over future impossibility of exploitation
of nature for human use. In this paper I will examine a range of independent documentaries that show a
spectrum of different degrees of environmental awareness by directors including Xu Xin, Du Haibin and Zhao
Liang, in relation to their generic and stylistic features.
Biographical note
Jessica Yeung is Associate Professor of Translation at Hong Kong Baptist University. She teaches courses on
Cultural Translation and Intercultural Studies,and is author of Ink Dances in Limbo: Gao Xingjian's Writings as
Cultural Translation (2008) and translator of Pema Tseden's Tharlo: Short Story and Film Script (2017).She has
just finished a book manuscript on the Hong Kong anarchist dramatist Augustine Mok, and her current project
is on Uyghur cinema since the early 20th century.
38
Panel 1·Day 2

Dr.Zhen Zhang
New York University, USA
The Intimate Camera in Chinese
Independent Documentary
Scholars including Qi Wang and Kiki Tianqi Yu have observed that a burgeoning "personal cinema" and “first-
person documentary" trend emerged around the new century in China. These films explore subjective visions
and private realms,pondering on the complex relationships between the self and family,and individual and
society. I join this inquiry by discussing two unique films by Chinese women (one with her Japanese partner)
that renovate Chinese "personal cinema" and "first-person documentary" in significant ways.
In Trace (2013), new mother and filmmaker Huang Ji,with her Japanese husband (also cinematographer for
her previous works) Ryuji Otsuka, return to her hometown in Hunan Province for their baby daughter's Chinese
household registration and passport application. The film delivers intimate scenes of family life on the road
and the obstacles they have to overcome, with Huang Ji holding camera most of the time tracking Ostuka
caring or carrying the baby throughout the quest for their child's identity papers, crisscrossing the borders
between the private and the public,the personal and the political.
In Listening to Third Grandma's Stories (2012), Wen Hui, China's leading choreographer of postmodern dance
and theater, returns to her father's hometown in Yunnan to meet her third grandmother, who had been
excluded and forgotten by the extended family. Part of Caochangdi's famous “Memory Project" produced by
Wu Wenguang,Wen Hui's takeis decidedly tactile and performative. The l/eye and the body of the filmmaker
are intertwined with those of the third grandma,forging a cross-generational bond and composite female
subject.
In both films, the camera serves, in ddifferent or overlapping ways, as an affective medium for probing the
possibility of an "intimate public sphere,"in which personal, domestic, gendered, and multicultural experiences
and perspectives perform and construct an alternative, embodied discourse on kinship and citizenship in
contemporary China.
Biographical note
Zhang Zhen is associate professor in cinema studies and history at New York University,where is also the
founder and director of the Asian Film & Media Initiative. Her publications include the award-winning An
Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1896-1937 (2005), The Urban Generation: Chinese
Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century(2007), and DV-Made China: Digital Subjects
and Social Transformations after Independent Film (co-editor, 2015), as well as numerous articles in journals,
anthologies and catalogues. She has curated film programs for the Lincoln Center of the Performing Arts, the
Museum of Modern Art and New York University, and initiated the Reel China Biennial at NYU in 2001.
39

Day
2
Panel 2: Documentary Film and the protest movements
1400-1640
Chair
Dr.Chao Shi Yan,Research Assistant Professor, Academy of Film, COMM, HKBU
Area of Interests
Chinese-language Cinemas /Documentary Film / Queer Theory/Media/
Transnational Cinemas
40

Dr.Evans Chan
Critic and Filmmaker
The Umbrella Movement and Martin
Luther King - a filmmaker's reflection
The Umbrella Movement,Hong Kong's 79-day democratic Occupy demonstration in 2014, followed the
Arab Spring and a global movement spearheaded by Occupy Wall Street. But it originated as a campaign
called “Occupy Central with Love and Peace,"as initiated by three Chinese Christians in Hong Kong-two
university professors and a pastor. One crucial document that inspired Benny Tai, law professor and conceiver
of Occupy Central, is Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963). Before Occupy Central's
mutation into the student-driven Umbrella Movement, thecampaign used the King essay as the foundation
for an outstanding civic educational initiative with a global lineage that ran from Thoreau, Gandhi, via Martin
Luther King to Hong Kong. Uniquely,the Hong Kong Occupy campaign had incorporated the strategizing of
Gene Sharp and implemented,in 2013,Deliberative Polling gatherings as developed by Stanford University's
Center for Deliberative Democracy. Evans Chan, New York-based film critic and director of the acclaimed
documentary "Raise the Umbrellas”(2016), revisits this incubating stage of the Umbrella Movement, while
offering personal testimony and observations about the continuing relevance and struggles in upholding
King's legacy in the US,and Hong Kong.
Biographical note
Evans Yiu Shing Chan (www.evanschan.com) is a New York-and Hong Kong-based critic, playwright, librettist
and an independent filmmaker. Chan's award-winning fiction and documentary features include Journey
to Beijing (1999) The Map of Sex and Love (2001), and Sorceress of the New Piano (2004), The Rose of the
Name (2014), Raise the Umbrellas (2016). His directorial debut To Liv(e) (1991) was named by Time Out as
one of the 100 Greatest Hong Kong Films. His Datong: The Great Society was named Movie of the Year by
Southern Metropolitan Daily in 2011, and subsequently adapted by Chan into a libretto for the highly acclaimned
opera,Datong: The Chinese Utopia,which toured London in 2017. A contributor to Critique, Asian Cinema,
Film International, Postmodern Culture, Cinemaya,and various anthologies, Chan is the editor/translator into
Chinese of three books by Susan Sontag. A critical anthology about Chan's works, Postcolonalism, Diaspora,
and Alternative Histories: The Cinema of Evans Chan, was published by the Hong Kong University Press in
2015.Chan obtained his PhD in Screen Culture at Northwestern University.
41
Day 2·Panel 2

Ms. BONNIE CHIU
HKBU
Biographical note
Ms. Chiu was born in and grew up in Hong Kong. She received a Bachelor of Social Sciences (Hons) in
Communication at Hong Kong Baptist College,Master of Arts degree in Legal Studies from the University of
Bristol and a Postgraduate Certificate in Laws from City University of Hong Kong.
She has extensive broadcast journalism experience in both reporting and anchoring. Ms. Chiu worked for the
television division of Radio Television Hlong Kong, Asia Television Limited, Cable TV and Television Broadcasts
Limited. In addition, she once worked as an intern at United Nations Radio in New York and as a trainee
solicitor in one of the Hong Kong's largest and leading law firms. Ms Chiu is a solicitor admitted in the High
Court of Hong Kong.
Ms.Chiu joined the Department of Journalism as Senior Lecturer in February 2010 and is currently teaching
several undergraduate courses including "Broadcast Reporting and Production", "Advanced Broadcast
Reporting and Production","News Anchoring" and "Media Law and Ethics”.
42
Panel 2·Day 2

Prof. Gina Marchetti
The University of HK
Documenting Sexual Citizenship in
the HKSAR: Evans Chan's RAISE THE
UMBRELLAS (2016)
In 1998, Jeffrey Weeks published an article entitled "The Sexual Citizen" in the journal Theory, Culture and
Society. In it, he notes the importance of the conjuncture of the traditionally private realms of gender and
sexuality, subjectivity, and erotic identity wvith the public rights of citizenship including access to public
space,free assembly,equal accommodation, and, ofcourse, full suffrage. During Hong Kong's 2014 Umbrella
Movement, a broad coalition of political groups and individuals banded together to occupy the territory's
streets to protest the Chinese CentralGovernment's interpretation of the HKSAR's Basic Law. The issue
that divided families and communities involved the question of universal suffrage and restrictions on the
right to run and hold public office. Local and international media galvanized attention on the mass protests,
and scholars have begun to analyze the movement from various perspectives. However, although LGBTQ
and feminist organizations as well as individual women played significant roles in the demonstrations, a full
accounting of the importance of these sexual citizens to Hong Kong's political development has yet to be done.
Films made after the 2014 protests that reflect on the movement and its impact provide a starting point for
this analysis of intersectional activism within the Umbrella Movement. Evans Chan's documentary RAISE THE
UMBRELLAS stands out in this regard because it devotes considerable screen time to Anthony Wong and
Denise Ho,two popular entertainers who openly advocate for gender and sexual equality, involved in the
movement. Collaborating with female cinematographers,including Nate Chan and Nora Lam, who, individually
made their owvn films about the demonstrations, Evans Chan highlighnts the importance of the rights of women
and sexual minorities to the struggle for suffrage and self-determination in Hong Kong. This analysis of
RAISE THE UMBRELLAS attempts to tease out the role sexual citizenship plays in calls for suffrage to better
appreciate the importance of feminist and LGBTQ perspectives to the forging of democracy in Asia.
Biographical note
Gina Marchetti is the author of Romance and the"Yellow Peril": Race, Sex and Discursive Strategies in
Hollywood Fiction (University of California, 1993), From Tian'anmen to Times Square: Transnational China
and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,2006), and The Chinese
Diaspora on American Screens: Race, Sex, and Cinema (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), Andrew
Lau and Alan Mak's INFERNAL AFFAIRS-The Trilogy(Hong Kong:Hong Kong University Press,2007), and
Citing China: Politics, Postmodernism and World Cinema (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2018).Visit the
website https://hkwomenfilmmakers.wordpress.com/for more information about her current work on Hong
Kong women filmmakers since 1997. To register for her Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Hong Kong
cinema,go to https://www.edx.org/course/hong-kong-cinema-through-global-lens-hkux-hku06-1x.
43
Day 2·Panel 2

Dr.Judith Pernin
French School of Asian Studies, EFEO
Documentary,Politics and the
Aesthetics of Protest in Taiwan and
Hong Kong from the 1990s onwards
Many scholars have noted strong parallels between recent protest movements in Hong Kong and Taiwan,
especially during the 2014 Sunflower and Umbrella occupations. Recent developments in both territories
have spurred comparable modes of protests reflected in slogans,artworks,and film and video productions. In
Taiwan, this political creativity is the legacy of film groups such as the Green Team which were already voicing
their views on Taiwan politics slightly before the ending of the Martial Law. With the gradual democratization
of Taiwan society,protest movements were well-represented in local documentary productions in the
1990s and the 2000s,bringing to the fore the specificities of the Taiwanese population and their varied
political aspirations. In Hong Kong, independent filmmakers have more recently started to record grassroots
movements demanding greater democratic rights and report on or advocate for various issues ranging from
environmental concerns and the preservation of local cultures, to opposition to land redevelopment and large
infrastructure projects.
What is the evolving roleof independent documentary images in fostering and representing these movements
in Taiwan and Hong Kong since the 1990s? Do specific political contexts create different ways of showing
social movements, or is there a common aesthetics of protests in recent Taiwan and Hong Kong documentary
films?
Based on film analyses and fieldwork research conducted in Taiwan and Hong Kong, this paper aims at
contrasting the history and aesthetics of documentaries on protest movements in Hong Kong and at assessing
the contribution of Hong Kong and Taiwan's documentaries to activist cinema.
Biographical note
Judith Pernin is an associate doctoral graduate at the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China
(CEFC-Hong Kong) and a postdoctoral researcher at the French School of Asian Studies (EFEO). Most
of her research focuses on Chinese independent documentary cinema with a PhD entitled Moving Images,
Independent Practices of Documentary in China (1990-2010) completed in 2012 at the School for Advanced
Studies in the Social Science (EHESS -Paris). Her dissertation was subsequently published as a monograph
in 2015. She is also the co-editor of Post 1990 Documentary Film, Reconfiguring independence(Edinburgh
University Press,2015).
44
Panel 2·Day 2

Prof. Carlos Rojas
Duke University, USA
Documenting Protest
From nearly the very beginning,(Chinese) protest and documentary have been tightly intertwined.One of the
earliest films about China, in fact,was James Williamson's 1900 'documentary' filmn,Attack on a China Mission,
which featured recreations (in Britain) of the Boxer Rebellion (which may be viewed as China's first popular
protests of the twentieth century). In this paper, I will undertake a comparative examination of the structural
conditions of documentaries and popular protests, particularly as they pertain to issues of time,persistence,
perspective, and so forth.
Biographical note
Carlos Rojas is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies; Gender, Sexuality,and Feminist Studies; and Arts of the
Moving Image at Duke University. He has authored,edited, and translated numerous volumes, including (with
Eileen Chow) The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas.
45
Day 2·Panel 2

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55

DOCUMENTARY FILM:
REGIONAL,
THEORETICAL& POLITICAL
PARAMETERS
25-27
June 2018
日期：2018年6月25-27日
結問：
Time.9
5:10 pm
Day 1:9:50am
Day 3:9:30am-4:40 pm
-
Conference Venue
CVA1022,Communicatio
and
Hereford Road,Kowloon Tong,
會議地點：香港力
傳理視藝大樓1022室
Enquiries : fmiresearch@hkbu.edu.hk
Screening Venue:
nmunication and
,5,Hereford Road,
Kowloon To
ong, HK.
電影放映地點：
香港九龍塘禧福道う號度盲
r tegistration Fee: HK$100 per day

Day 5 Panel 1: Colonial Documentary Film (9:30-12:10pm)
Panel 2:Theoretical
henomenology and film (2:00-4:40pm)
5:30-8:00pm
rector Dr.Steven
Advance Reglstration
大電影學院

Day
3
Panel 1:Colonial Documentary Film
0930-1210
Chair
Prof.lan Aitken, Professor,Academy of Film, COMM, HKBU
Area of Interests
Film Studies /Documentary Film/Film Theory/Film History/Colonial
Film Studies / Cinematic Realism
57

Prof. Timothy P. Barnard
National University of Singapore
Shooting Singapore:Stock Footage
of a Colonial City in Popular Films of
the 1950s and 1960s
Singapore had a vibrant film industry throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s. While the government
produced official documentaries through the Malayan Film Unit, there were also two very productive film
studios - Shaw Brothers' Malay Film Production and Cathay Keris -which produced hundreds of movies,
usually shot on their production lots on Jalan Ampas and East Coast Road. Many of the films, however, did
contain stock footage of the city,documenting a period of rapid modernization as well as decolonization. This
paper will examine the portrayal of Singapore in these narrative films, and how they reflect similarities and
differences with those from the Malayan Film Unit.
Biographical note
Timothy P. Barnard is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the National University of
Singapore, where he specializes in the environmental and cultural history of island Southeast Asia. His research
has focused on a range of topics including state formation in the eighteenth-century Straits of Melaka,
Malay identity throughout history, Malay film in the 1950s, and the environmental history of Singapore. His
publications include numerous book chapters and articles, as well as the monographs Multiple Centres of
Authority (KITLV, 2003) Nature's Colony (NUS Press 2016) and the edited volumes Contesting Malayness (NUS
Press, 2004) and Nature Contained (NUS Press, 2014). He is currently writing a book on the history of animals
in colonial Singapore.
58
Panel 1·Day 3

Prof. Peter Bloom
University of California Santa Barbara, USA
Colonial Documentary Film Narrating
the Malayan Emergency: Ventriloquizing
Subjectivity in British ColoniaI Film and Radio
The Malayan Emergency (1948-60) has often been described as the foundational counterinsurgency
campaign. It is most often remembered as a "successful" political and mnilitary strategy that supported the
return of the British Administration to Malaya (Singapore and Peninsular Malaysia) in the aftermath of the
Japanese occupation and surrender in 1945. However, it was also a series of propaganda techniques defined
in opposition to a construction of the Communist insurgency. This contribution addresses the nature of the
spoken voice as media in the service of the counterinsurgency campaign which began with a labor dispute
culminating in the murder of British plantation managers on two Malayan rubber estates in 1948 (Yao 2016).
Techniques of narration marked by elocutionary pedigree were used as voiceover commentary in
documentary films and on the radio in Malaya that followed a series of well defined news cycles.Initiated
with guidance cables that were sent directly from the Foreign Office in London, the newly reorganized and
expanded Malayan Film Unit and Radio Malaya became charged with producing media in support of these
campaigns. Media strategies at work during the Emergency have been widely commented upon (Deery 2003,
Hack 2009, Ramakrishna 2002) just as the nature and quality of the speaking voice has been addressed in
relation to British social class and authority throughout Empire (Damousi 2008, Hill 2010, Mugglestone 2008,
Pinkerton and Dodd 2008). By reference to literature focused on the colonial legacy of English Language
Teaching (ELT) (Pennycook 1998) however,I examine how the role and function of spoken English as vehicle
and icon functioned as lure in the formation of subjectivity and narrative staging. In addition to a discussion of
particular radio programs about the Emergency,I also examine voice-over narration in films produced by the
Malayan Film Unit, including Malaya Speaks (1956).
Biographical note
Peter J. Bloom is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Film and Media
Studies at UC-Santa Barbara. His recent work has focused on film and radio in late colonial Ghana and
Malaya.He has published extensively on British,French, and Belgian colonial media including French Colonial
Documentary (University of Minnesota Press,2007),Frenchness and the African Diaspora (co-editor, Indiana
UP,2009),and Modernization as Spectacle in Africa (co-editor, Indiana UP, 2014). His current project, entitled
Onomatopoeia and Empire, addresses the unifying context for radio-cinema modernity by reference to
Counterinsurgency and Pan-Africanism.
59
Day 3·Panel 1

Dr. Annamaria
Motrescu-Mayes
University of Cambridge,UK
Legacies of exotic out takes: documentary
visual rhetoric 'made in Hong Kong'
Issues of late colonial and early post-colonial visual rhetoric common to documentary films made between
1940s-1970s are particularly challenging when discussing representations of Hong Kong. In the case of this
Crown colony (1842-1981, after which it was a British Dependent Territory until 1997), the legacy of British
imperial popular visual culturehas often been substituted with vibrant portraits of autonomous modernism,
economic expansion and civic self-determination. This paper will examine several documentary films and
amateur ethno-travelogues made in Hong Kong in the 1940s and 1960s,and will propose that they qualify as
examples of a visual anthropological exercise taking for its subject-Other the region's transmigrant identity.
Drawing on the investigative framework proposed by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi's work with
their 'camera analytique'- the technological and theoretical manipulation of variable meanings found in
archival footage - the discussion will explore some of the cultural protocols that endorsed and continue
to allow for a Hong Kong-specific exoticism. Also, issues of imperial and post-colonnial iconography will be
discussed in relation to the documentary mode and semantic memory reiterations informing the process of
'othering' Hong Kong within the East Asian cuultural context. Finally, the paper will highlight other possible
exploratory perspectives addressing the ways in which the legacy of late colonial visual culture is still priming
representations of Hong Kong, as for example, in twenty-first century mainstream TV documentaries.
Biographical note
Dr Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes is a Visiting Lecturer in new and digital media at the Department of Social
Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Fellow and Tutor at Clare Hall,and a member of the Cambridge
Digital Humanities Network. She is a visual and digital humanities scholar working on British imperial studies,
theories of media,and issues of racial and gender identities. Her current research and teaching centres on
new theoretical models drawing on visual culture, cognitive psychology,and postcolonial studies. She is the
author of Visual histories of South Asia (co-edited with Marcus Banks. Primus,2017), British women amateur
filmmakers. National memories and global identities (with Heather Norris Nicholson. Edinburgh University
Press, 2018) and Amateur Media: film,video, digital media and participatory cultures (wvith Susan Aasman,
Routledge,2018). Annamaria is also the founder of the Amateur Cinema Studies Network.
60
Panel 1·Day 3

Dr. Sandeep Ray
Singapore University of Technology
and Design
Early Cinematic Visualization of Umma:
A 1928 film on the Hajj
In 1928, Georg Krügers made the first cinematic record of the Hajj when he followed pilgrims from the
Dutch East Indies to Mecca and back. Het Groote Mekka-Feest (The Great Mecca Feast) is a closely filmed,
ethnographically rich account of a phenomenon that even in the 1920s saw about 30 to 50 thousand pilgrims
voyaging fromn Java and Sumatra. An unusual document in its intimate filming in areas that forbid cameras,
it has rarely been referenced by academics and historians save the noted Dutch colonial Islamic scholar
Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje who introduced its first screening in Leiden. The film was subsequently shown in
theatres in Java for several years. The author inadvertently came across the material in 2013 at the Beeld en
Geluid archive in Hilversum in the Netherlands. Presenting excerpts from the film, the author will argue that
the global scope of the documentary makes an early cinematic statement that promulgates a transnational
unity of the Islamic faith.
Biographical note
Sandeep Ray received his B.A. from Hampshire College, M.A. from the University of Mlichigan, and a PhD
from the National University of Singapore. He is currently asenior lecturer at the Singapore University
of Technology and Design. He previously taught at the University of Wisconsin (2015-16),and was a Luce
postdoctoral fellowat Rice University (2016-17). He is currently working on Celluloid Colony: Inadvertent
Ethnography in Early Dutch Colonial Film,a monograph analyzing the historical and ethnographic value in
propaganda films produced in colonial Indonesia. His interests lie in visual studies, ethnographic film,and
in transnational, interdisciplinary approaches to media and Asian studies. Sandeep has complemented his
academic career as a filmmaker, and looks forward to working with students and faculty in developing new
approaches in non-fiction filmmaking and in archiving visual histories. His films have been reviewed in The
American Anthropologist, The Journal for VisualAnthropology and have screened at several festivals including
in Busan (BIFF), Taiwan (TIDF), Sydney (SIFF), Paris (Jean Rouch), Tehran (IIFF), Copenhagen (DOX), and
have curated at the Flaherty Seminar, the Margaret Mead Festival, the Films Division of India, and the Whitney
and Getty Museums.
61
Day 3·Panel 1

Dr. Tom Rice
University of St. Andrews Scotland, Scotland
"How to Make Films the
Englishman's Way”: Film Schools
across the British Empire
On Monday 13 September 1948, a group of six trainees from Nigeria and the Gold Coast (Ghana) began their
first day at a film training school in Accra. Organised and run by the British Government's Colonial Film Unit
(1940-1955), the Accra school would be followed in the next few years by further fiIm schools in Jamaica and
Cyprus, alongside a regular training programme run by the CFU in London.
In this paper,I examine the ideology, practices and legacies of the Colonial Film Unit's extensive training
programmes. What did these schools teach? What films did they produce? How did they imagine educational
and instructional film for colonial audiences, propagating a "specialised technique,"which was predicated on
reductive assumptions about the capabilities of colonial audiences (and filmmakers)? Through the pages of
the CFU's own in-house magazine (Colonial Cinema), government reports, interviewsand rarely-seen films,the
paper highlights the ways in which these training programmes sought to manage and mediate the rapid social
and political changes taking root across the post-war British Empire as they promoted a continued message of
“partnership” and perpetuated British influence both on and off screen. Jamaican Cinematographer Franklyn
St Juste, describing the second training school in Jamaica,argued that the local trainees were taught “how to
make films the Englishman's way." The trainees, who were often educators and administrators, would go on to
form the nucleus of the "local" film units formed across the Empire and, in many cases,would lead these units
beyond independence. These schools are then crucial, but largely unknown, moments in the establishment
of post-colonial cinemas, while also serving as records of the British government's attempts to record and
manage the final days of Empire.
Biographical note
Tom Rice is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He is the author of
White Robes, Silver Screens: Movies and the Making of the Ku Klux Klan (Indiana University Press,2015).He
previously worked as the senior researcher on a major project on British colonial film (www.colonialfilm.org.
uk) and has written extensively on colonial,government and educational film. He is currently finishing his next
book for University of California Press, which is provisionally entitled Watching Empire Dissolve: Through the
Lens of the Colonial Film Unit.
62
Panel 1·Day 3

3
Panel 2: Theoretical issues: phenomenologyy and film
1400-1640
Chair
Dr.Dorothy Lau,Lecturer, Academy of Film, COMM,HKBU
Area of Interests
Film History / Film Theory / Transnational Cinema / Asian Cinema
Martial Arts Cinema / Cyberculture / Screen Culture / Stardom /
Fandom/Participatory culture
63

Dr. Jenny Chamarette
Queen Mary University of London, UK
Autonomy versus interdependence:Complex
embodiment in Planet of Snail (Seung-Jun Yi,
2012) and The Grown-Ups (Maite Alberdi,2016)
My focus for this paper is on the notion of complex embodiment in relation to existing definitions of film-
phenomenology and contemporary documentary filmmaking. Adopted from Tobin Siebers'groundbreaking
work on disability and intersectionality, complex embodiment is a way of recognizing the multitudinous ways
in which (human) bodies operate within the complex social, cultural, physical and emotional environments in
which we live, survive, and sometimes thrive.
Two examples of contemporary documentary serve in my paper to highlight the ways in which film has the capacity
to engage critically with the ethics of bodily complexity. In Planet of Snail, the deaf-blind poet Young-chan and his
wife,Soon-ho,who has a spinal deformity,collaborate interdependently to support one another in a loving,sensitive
relationship full of emotional complexity. This portrait of a couple avoids the overused tropes often relied upon in
cinematic representations of disability and impairment,instead focusing on the ways in which Young-chan and
Soon-ho's bodily interdependence facilitates their communicative agency and bodily autonomy through the model
of a married heterosexual couple. In The Grown Ups, the notion of bodily autonomy through sexuality is gently
questioned through the film's quiet reflections on students in a private school for adults with Down's Syndrome.
While the school itself is designed to facilitate the students in taking up a full and responsible adult life in relation to
personal care,domestic skills, finance, employment and sexual health, The Grown Ups compassionately observes
the emerging relationship and resultant frustrations of a couple,Anita and Andrès, who are paradoxically prevented
from asserting their own sexual identities and physical independence,both by their carers and by Argentinian law.
The two films side-by-side offer an important testing ground for the associated capacities and limitations of
thinking about bodily autonomy and bodily interdependence, not just from the perspective of disability, but
more broadly in relation to phenomenological questions of complex embodiment in contemporary documentary.
Biographical note
Jenny Chamarette is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author
of Phenomenology and the Future of Film (2012), and has published widely on embodiment,affect,and
the moving image, in journals such as Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Paragraph, Studies
in French Cinema, and Modern and Contemporary France. Her research examines intermediality, embodied
and existential phenomenologies,cultural politics and intersectionality in contemporary visual and moving
image cultures, particularly in Europe,North America and the Middle East. She is currently at work on her
book, Cinemuseology: Museum Vitrines, Digital Screens and Cultural Politics, and is about to embark on a
collaborative AHRC-funded project on the digital archive and legacy of the artist filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin.
For some years she has also been exploring creative alternatives to academic scholarship through art writing,
curation and programming artist's moving image, and short stories.
64
Panel 2·Day 3

Dr.Tiago de Luca
University of Warwick, UK
Homo Sapiens(2016): An Imaginary
Documentary
This paper will treat the film Homo Sapiens (2016, Nikolaus Geyrhalter) as a fascinating case study that
deliberately blurs the lines separating fiction and documentary film. Homo Sapiens wvas inspired by Alain
Weisman's bestseller The World Without Us (2007), a book that attempts to 'picture a world from which we
all suddenly vanished'. Unlike the book, however,which invokes picturing as the formation of a mental image
through description, Homo Sapiens already gives us pre-formed indexical images. Indeed, when set against
contemporary end-of-the-world films,Homo Sapiens stands out in that it dispenses with the use of computer-
generated imagery (CGI) in order to bring into view a disastrous future that is to come, opting instead for
combining wordless, meticulously composed images of real derelict places in which humanity is nowhere to
be seen.
Of course, unless a film is an animation or entirely simulated, it always preserves a documental dimension
owing to the evidentiary properties of the film image. Likewise,any documentary that is worthy of the name
will necessarily abide by structures and devices found in fiction films. The case of Homo Sapiens, however,
is especially complex,for whereas the film is officially classed as a documentary and could be seen as a
catalogue of existing ruinous sites, its evocative imagery and sound design intimate a futuristic,and therefore
fictional, scenario of world destruction. This oscillation between cinematic categories is thus mapped onto
different temporal registers, ultimately raising philosophical questions regarding the act of looking at the
world when there is no human in it to see it. That is, if this is a world without us, whose vision is this (or are
these) that we as viewers asked to assumed in the film? To explore this qquestion, this paper will propose the
1970s apparatus theory as a productive conceptual bridge to think how Homo Sapiens conflates the domains
of cinematic and speculative realism.
Biographical note
Dr Tiago de Luca is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of
Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Reality(2014) and the co-editor of Slow
Cinema (2016). His writings on world cinema have appeared in numerous journals, including Screen, Cinema
Journal, Cinephile and Senses of Cinema. His new book project,Envisioning the World,explores how the Earth
has been imagined in the cinema and related media.
65

Dr. Steven Eastwood
Queen Mary University of London, UK
Biographical note
Steven Eastwood is an artist-filmmaker working in both the cinema and gallery. His feature film Buried Land
was officially selected for Tribeca, Moscow,Sarajevo, Mumbai film festivals 2010. Recent and forthcoming
exhibitions and screenings include Fabrica Gallery Brighton; London Film Festival; Jerwood Space,London. His
documentary Those Who Are Jesus was nominated for a Grierson Award. Prior to joining QMUL Steven was
the director of the Moving Image Research Centre at the University of East London, and an assistant professor
in film at SUNY Buffalo. He has convened a number of symposia and screenings to do with cinema and artists'
moving image, and has published widely. He co-founded the arts laboratory event OMSK (1995-2008), a
London based collective of artists creating site specific and cross-disciplinary events. Steven gainedd a theory-
practice PhD through UCL, The Slade in 2007.
66
Panel 2·Day 3

Dr. Cecilia Mello
University of São Paulo, Brazil
Observational realism and long
duration in Wang Bing's Crude Oil
Despite the conventional commercial length that rarely exceeds three hours for feature films,the cinema
coexists with long-running experiences since at least Napoléon by Abel Gance from 1927. During the 1960s,
Andy Warhol often used long duration to question or simply to distance his cinematographic work from any
commercial standards of film production. More recently, the debate about duration seems to have gained
strength and relevance in the face of the use of digital technology (De Luca and Jorge, 2016),which facilitated
not only the filming of excessively long takes but also increased the shooting ratio manifold,posing an
unprecedented challenge for filmmakers and editors.Within this shifting landscape, the work of Wang Bing,
one of the main representatives of the Chinese independent documentary film movement,stands out for its
experiments with long duration. This paper will investigate the aesthetic and political motivations behind his
2008 long-running documentary Crude Oil（采油日記 Cai You Ri Ji）， which devotes 840 minutes （14 hours） to
a day in the lives of workers in oil fields in northwest China. Shown in movie theaters and in the gallery space,
Crude Oi/ is an exercise in protracted observational realism,conveyed through exceedingly long takes that
exaggerate the Bazinian realist impulse towards its subversion, thus contributing to the contemporary debate
about cinematic realism and phenomenology in the digital era.
Biographical note
Cecília Mello is Lecturer in Film Studies at the Department of Film, Radio and Television, University of São
Paulo. Her research focuses on world cinema - with an emphasis on British and Chinese cinemas -and on
issues of realism, cinema and urban spaces and intermediality. She has published several articles and book
chapters,co-edited the books Realism and the Audiovisual Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), The 27st Century
Film, TV & Media School: Challenges, Clashes, Changes (Cilect, 2016) and edited the book Phantasmagorical
Realism (University of São Paulo,2015). Her forthcoming book, The Cinema of Jia Zhangke: Realism and
Memory in Chinese Film willbe published by I.B. Tauris in 2018.
67
Day 3·Panel 2

Dr. Richard Rushton
Lancaster University,UK
Reality Fictions and Filmic Reality:
Recent Films by Frederick Wiseman
Frederick Wiseman's documentaries have been criticized for lacking social commitment and context,and of
avoiding engagement with the world (the most acute of these criticisms has been made by Brian Winston). I
argue, to the contrary,that what Wiseman's films most poignantly show is the emergence of the social; they
chart the ways in which social interaction creates 'the world' as such.
As Bill Nichols argued many years ago, Wiseman's films show events not as the effects of specific causes,
but rather as events that are embedded in structures. These structures - evoked by the institutions that are
the focus of WViseman's films - are themselves composed of habits and customs. Therefore,some of the
questions posed by Wiseman's films are: where do these habits and customs come from? - and how do
these customs and habits either endure or change? The answers Wiseman's films give to these questions are
that these customs and habits emerge by virtue of decisions made by people. Many of the finest moments
in these films thus focus on the ways that meanings emerge as the consequences of the decisions made by
people. Wiseman's films show us that meaning is always-already social; that the world is 'made' by the people
who make it. To this degree,institutions and structures are not monolithic and unchanging (or necessarily
repressive). Rather, they are always subject to negotiation and change.
My discussion of these issues focuses on some of Wiseman's recent films: La Danse (2009), At Berkeley (2013),
National Gallery (2014), and In Jackson Heights (2015).
Biographical note
Richard Rushton is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Lancaster University, UK. He is author of The Reality
of Film (Manchester University Press,2011), Cinema After Deleuze (Continuum, 2012) and The Politics of
Hollywood Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
68
Panel 2·Day 3

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78

Day 1
Free Screening:
Advance Registration Required:fmiresearch@hkbu.edu.hk
"Raise the Umbrellas”
by
撐傘
Dr. Evans Chan
25 June 2018 MON
-530-8pm
CVA104
リラ
The film explores the origin and impact of Hong Kong's 2014 pro-democracy
demonstrations through the inter-generational lenses of three post-Tiananmen
democratic activists alongside other cultural and social characters in the movements
and pro-Beijing counter voices. Comprehensive and intimate, driven by stirring
footage of a mega-metropolis riven by protest, the film lays bare the sheer political
risk for post-colonial Hong Kong's universal-suffragist ambitions that reverberates
across Greater China and democratic movements around the world.
GG
Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2kxtQW-nAA
79

Day 2
Free Screening:
Advance Registration Required:fmiresearch@hkbu.edu.hk
"Vanished Archives”
消失的檔案
by
Ms. Lo Yan Wai Connie
26 June 2018 TUE
-530-830pm-CVA104
55
“Vanished Archives”消失的檔案 is a record of the 1967 riots，an important event
in contemporary Hong Kong. The production team interviewed people who were
directly involved in and witnessed the riots. They are leaders from the leftist camp
and trade unions, former police officers, senior government officials, members of the
explosives team, journalists, and students. A large amount of newspaper clippings and
declassified National Archives of the British Government were also reviewed in the
process. Among all others,"Notes on 1967” (written by Ng Tik-chow, deputy head of
the HK & Macao Group of the Foreign Affairs Office under the State Council) revealed
that the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party was well informed of
details of the riots and issued orders from time to time.
For over four years, film director Connie Lo Yan-wai persevered in tracking down,
consolidating, and analyzing a massive amount of information to reconstruct the
profound and far-reaching impacts of this event on the territory. “Respect the facts,
and learn from the lessons." This is the vision of the director. We want to find the real
1967 Hong Kong.
リノ
Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVjros8Qw84
80

Day 3
Private Screening:
Advance Registration Required:
fmiresearch@hkbu.edu.hk
“|sland”by
Dr. Steven Eastwood
27 June 2018 WED
530-8pm
CVA104
5ラ
Across the water on the island, four individuals experience the endd of life. Showing
rarely seen and intensely private events, the film follows the progression of illness for
each character and, for one, the last days and hours of life,the moment of death, and
after death care.A lyrical,slow cinema description of the temporality and phenomena
of dying,this film sensitively witnesses the transition away from personhood. This is
a palliative island, the Isle of Wight, an enigmatic landscape where all around rituals
persist. Parallel to bedside vigils and the rhythm of breathing, we see rescue owls
on the hospice ward, the rugged coastline, and the constant ferry arrivals. A choir
rehearses Brahm's 'Germian Requiem'. In the hospital pathology lab,microscopic
close-ups of cancer show the interior of the bodies, our biology, our creatureliness.
Death is presented as natural andd everyday but also unspeakable and strange.Official
Selection Rotterdam International Film Festival 2018- International premiere http://
www.hakawati.co.uk/index.html#prod_1
リリ
Trailer:
http://film.britishcouncil.org/island3
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End of Conference
Thank You
very much indeed~