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Manoeuvring around mainland China's censors and pushing back against threats of lawsuits, online harassment, and physical violence, #MeToo activists shed a particularly harsh light on the treatment of women in the cinema and entertainment industries. Focusing on films from the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora, this book considers how female directors shape Chinese visual politics through the depiction of the look, the stare, the leer, the glare, the glimpse, the glance, the queer and the oppositional gaze in fiction and documentary filmmaking. In the years leading up to and following in the wake of #MeToo, these cosmopolitan women filmmakers offer innovative angles on body image, reproduction, romance, family relations, gender identity, generational differences, female sexuality, sexual violence, sex work, labor migration, career options, minority experiences, media access, feminist activism and political rights within the rapidly changing Chinese cultural orbit.

Women Filmmakers in Sinophone World Cinema portrays a group of important contemporary women filmmakers working across the Sinophone world including Taiwan, Hong Kong, the mainland, and beyond. The book delineates and conceptualizes their cinematic and trans-media practices within an evolving, multifaceted feminist intimate-public commons. The films by these experienced and emerging filmmakers, including Huang Yu-shan, Yau Ching, Ai Xiaoming, Wen Hui, Huang Ji and others, represent some of the most innovative and socially engaged work in both fictional and non-fictional modes in Chinese-language cinema as well as global women's cinema. Their narrative, documentary, and experimental film practices from the 1980s to the present, along with their work in sister media such as dance, theater, literature, and contemporary art, their activities as scholars, educators, activists, and film festival organizers or jurors, have significantly reshaped the landscape of Sinophone film culture and expanded the borders of world cinema.

Women and Gender in Chinese Martial Arts Films of the New Millennium, by Ya-chen Chen, is an excavation of underexposed gender issues focusing mainly on contradictory and troubled feminism in the film narratives. In the cinematic world of martial arts films, one can easily find representations of women of Ancient China released from the constraints of patriarchal social order to revel in a dreamlike space of their own. They can develop themselves, protect themselves, and even defeat or conquer men. This world not only frees women from the convention of foot-binding, but it also \"unbinds\" them in terms of education, critical thinking, talent, ambition, opportunities to socialize with different men, and the freedom or right to both choose their spouse and decide their own fate. Chen calls this phenomenon \"Chinese cinematic martial arts feminism.\" The liberation is never sustaining or complete, however; Chen reveals the presence of a glass ceiling marking the maximal exercise of feminism and women's rights which the patriarchal order is willing to accept. As such, these films are not to be seen as celebrations of feminist liberation, but as enunciations of the patriarchal authority that suffuses \"Chinese cinematic martial arts feminism.\" The film narratives under examination include Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (directed by Ang Lee); Hero (Zhang Yimou); House of the Flying Daggers (Zhang Yimou); Seven Swords (Tsui Hark); The Promise (Chen Kaige); The Banquet (Feng Xiaogang); and Curst of the Golden Flower (Zhang Yimou). Chen also touches upon the plots of two of the earliest award-winning Chinese martial arts films, A Touch of Zen and Legend of the Mountain, both directed by King Hu.

Beginning first as a case study of Feng Xiaogang, this book explores Chinese film history since the early 1990s in terms of changes of the Communist Party's film policy, industry reforms, the official promotion of Main Melody films and the emergence and g

With 25 essays that embrace a wide spectrum of topics and perspectives including intertextuality, transnationality, gender representation, repetition, the use of music, color, and sound, depiction of time and space in human affairs, and Wong's highly original portrayal of violence, A Companion to Wong Kar-Wai is a singular examination of the prestigious filmmaker known around the world for the innovation, beauty, and passion he brings to filmmaking. Brings together the most cutting edge, in-depth, and interesting scholarship on arguably the greatest living Asian filmmaker, from a multinational group of established and rising film scholars and critics Covers a huge breadth of topics such as the tradition of the jianghu in Wong's films; queering Wong's films not in terms of gender but through the artist's liminality; the phenomenological Wong; Wong's intertextuality; America through Wong's eyes; the optics of intensities, thresholds, and transfers of energy in Wong's cinema; and the diasporic presence of some ladies from Shanghai in Wong's Hong Kong Examines the political, historical, and sociological influence of Wong and his work, and discusses his work from a variety of perspectives including modern, post-modern, postcolonial, and queer theory Includes two appendices which examine Wong's work in Hong Kong television and commercials

The widely acclaimed films of Wong Kar-wai are characterized by their sumptuous yet complex visual and sonic style. This study of Wong’s filmmaking techniques uses a poetics approach to examine how form, music, narration, characterization, genre, and other artistic elements work together to produce certain effects on audiences. Bettinson argues that Wong’s films are permeated by an aesthetic of sensuousness and “disturbance” achieved through techniques such as narrative interruptions, facial masking, opaque cuts, and other complex strategies. The effect is to jolt the viewer out of complete aesthetic absorption. Each of the chapters focuses on a single aspect of Wong’s filmmaking. The book also discusses Wong’s influence on other filmmakers in Hong Kong and around the world. The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai will appeal to all who are interested in authorship and aesthetics in film studies, to scholars in Asian studies, media and cultural studies, and to anyone with an interest in Hong Kong cinema in general, and Wong’s films in particular.

Global connections and screen innovations converge in Hong Kong cinema. Energized by transnational images and human flows from China and Asia, Hong Kong’s commercial filmmakers and independent pioneers have actively challenged established genres and narrative conventions to create a cultural space independent of Hollywood. The circulation of Hong Kong films through art house and film festival circuits, as well as independent DVDs and galleries and internet sites, reveals many differences within global cultural distributions, as well as distinctive tensions between experimental media artists and traditional screen architects. Covering the contributions of Hong Kong New Wave directors such as Wong Kar-wai, Stanley Kwan, Ann Hui, Patrick Tam, and Tsui Hark, the volume links their spirit of innovation to work by independent, experimental, and documentary filmmakers, including Fruit Chan, Tammy Cheung, Evans Chan, Yau Ching and digital artist Isaac Leung. Within an interdisciplinary frame that highlights issues of political marginalization, censorship, sexual orientation, gender hierarchies, “flexible citizenship” and local/global identities, this book speaks to scholars and students within as well as beyond the field of Hong Kong cinema.

This book focuses on England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It takes a look at the cultural and artistic significance of British cinema from the silent era to the present, providing critical essays and insights into the shifting notions of Britishness, important industry developments and the endurance of the British film industry.

India has long been known for its film industry and remains by far the largest film producer in the world, surpassing other film-producing superpowers like the US and China. A major factor in India’s dominance in the global media landscape is the outsourcing of film production, especially within Europe. Although there are studies trying to explain the context and mechanisms of foreign settings being incorporated into Indian filmmaking, this knowledge remains scattered and unsystematic. The objective of this paper is to comprehensively examine the evolutionary, spatial, and collaborative dynamics of Indian filmmaking in Europe by analysing statistical data from IMDb as the world’s largest film database. Our findings show that Indian filmmakers appeared relatively infrequently in Europe until the mid-1990s. The British Isles and Western Europe, with London and the Swiss Alps as the main centres, became the first and most popular destinations for outsourcing Indian films. However, this trend has changed in the last two decades, with the focus shifting to other areas in Southern, Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe as well in recent decades. The initial wave of Bollywood productions has gradually been followed by other regional cinematographies. The increasing presence of Indian film shooting in Europe has also led to growing co-production between filmmakers on both (sub)continents. The paper provides a solid basis for further exploration of socio-economic linkages between India and Europe, especially in terms of job creation, local economic development, tourism, and cultural exchange.

This article concentrates on four Chinese blockbuster movies, Wolf Warrior (2015), Operation Mekong (2016), Wolf Warrior 2 (2017) and Operation Red Sea (2018), referring to them collectively as the “wolf warrior cycle” on the basis of their shared themes of China's overseas military actions. To understand why films addressing this topic have emerged since the mid-2010s, the article employs a critical political economy approach and situates the wolf warrior cycle in China's transforming foreign policies. It argues that the Belt and Road Initiative, one of the state's prominent foreign policies and global strategies in this period, played a crucial role in shaping the production of the wolf warrior cycle films under a trend of the politicization of commercial blockbusters in the Chinese film industry. In turn, these films contributed to the formation of the “wolf warrior diplomacy” image by reinforcing the proactiveness of China's diplomacy and nationalistic stereotypes in Chinese society towards international relations.