Prof. Zhen Zhang, NYU, Department of Cinema Studies

Lecture: “‘We Are Alive’: Minor Transnationalism and Yau Ching’s Experimental Filmmaking”

Recommended film: We Are Alive (Huai hai zi, 壞孩子, 2010), directed by Yau Ching, Hong Kong  

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Drawing from a book project on contemporary Sinophone women filmmakers, this talk discusses Hong Kong queer filmmaker Yau Ching’s documentary We Are Alive (2010), developed from therapeutic video workshops she and her team conducted with confined delinquent adolescents in Hong Kong, Macau and Japan. We Are Alive has been seen as “the least queer film” in her filmography and rejected by several LGBT+ film festivals. Yet, its engagement with the so-called “bad kids” (the films’ Chinese title) and their complex self-presentations questions dominant repressive moral strictures and criminal justice systems across several East Asian societies. In effect, the participatory, transformational and comparative project on juvenile delinquency, adolescent femininities and masculinities, and social conformity offers an instructive case study of minor transnationalism through a queer lens.

Zhen Zhang is associate professor at the Department of Cinema Studies of New York University. The main areas of her scholarly interests include Chinese-language film history in its cultural, aesthetic, political, and gendered manifestations, within the broad frameworks of modernity, modernism, and cosmopolitanism.

This will be the final session of the Chinese-language Cinema Global Film Series, curated by Prof. Tanya Shilina-Conte and cosponsored by the UB Center for Global Film (English) and Confucius Institute.