A City of Sadness (1989) has long attracted Western scholarly attention for its linguistic diversity and aural politics, with many analyses repeating the inaccurate claim that City was the first Taiwanese film to use sync sound rather than post-production dubbing. Such an overinvestment in linguistic and sonic fidelity as a means of deriving knowledge of Taiwan can delimit Taiwanese film historiography. This article develops the concept of ‘sonolingual composition’ to deconstruct the shifting relationship among body, language, and voice in Taiwan cinema, with two films as case studies. First comes a discursive analysis of attitudes toward dubbing in 1970s guoyupian. Anxiety over the tension between realism and linguistic orthodoxy was most acute when top-billed stars opened their mouths, with the half-dubbed, half-sync sound A Journey of Love (1978) a provocative example. Second comes a look at localized Hong Kong cinema in the 80s and 90s, with a particular focus on Shi Banyu’s dubbing work for Stephen Chow. Shi’s bravura turn in the parallel Mandarin and Taigi dubs of Flirting Scholar (1993) illustrate how even as there was a space for linguistic pluralism in the post-marital law era, demand for a particular star affect could constrain vocal performance.

This article reflects on the media scholar’s practices of care toward the objects of their study, and it asks about the relation between care and critique. How does one care for media objects and do the work of critique with care? To approach this question, I perform two analyses at once: an analysis of the politics of aesthetics in three documentaries on the 2019 Hong Kong protests and a meta-analysis of my practices of care when writing about these films. I argue that different aesthetic forms articulate different figures of ‘the Hong Kong people’ as a collective political subject, which is demonstrated in the different modes of articulation and orientations to futurity adopted by Kiwi Chow’s Revolution of Our Times (2021), the Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers’ Inside the Red Brick Wall (2020), and Chan Tze Woon’s Blue Island (2022). While conducting this analysis, I reflect on how critique often begins from a position of distance that elides practices of care. I propose that reading with care requires the scholar to reorient their relation to the media object from a position of distance to a position of proximity, attuned to the multiple possibilities of thought opened up by different media texts.

The China–UK Film Co-Production Treaty, signed in 2014, marked a symbolic step in strengthening bilateral cultural diplomacy and industry cooperation. This article critically reassesses the treaty’s intentions and outcomes within wider political, economic, and cultural contexts. Drawing on typologies from Morawetz et al. and Hjort, it explores the contrasting motivations behind co-productions and the structural ­barriers that have limited the treaty’s impact. The analysis situates the UK–China case within broader global co-production frameworks and highlights the challenges posed by regulatory asymmetries, institutional fragmentation, and geopolitical tensions. While the treaty aimed to facilitate mutual access and creative exchange, its limited results point to deeper misalignments between policy ambition and industrial reality. This study contributes to ongoing debates on international co-productions, film policy in China and the UK, and the role of soft power in cross-cultural screen collaboration amid an evolving global film landscape.

The trope of father–son relationships in ‘family-home’ melodramas has been a critical characteristic of Hong Kong cinema that can be read in parallel with the ever-changing local society. This paper investigates the ways in which Drifting (2021), Hong Kong Family (2022), and The Sunny Side of the Street (2022) re-imagine modes of local community formation through the genre of family-home melodrama in the aftermath of the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) Movement. By featuring a dysfunctional father seeking redemption and an avoidant son searching for an independent sense of self and community outside of the family, I argue that these film characters could be read allegorically as the government and the people, corresponding to the political divide that has persisted since 2014 in Hong Kong. Furthermore, by contextualising these films within a social atmosphere characterised by post-protest grief and resilience, I expand my discussion to the formation of affective communities made possible by shared experiences of trauma and a common desire for resilience.

Children’s films have long been an underexplored topic in Chinese cinema studies. This article explores how Great Leap Forward children’s films in the form of artistic documentaries/documentary art films served both as a vehicle for state propaganda and, more importantly, as a dynamic space for constructing a ‘modern socialist childhood’. I demonstrate that children’s cultural productions, including literature and film, in the early PRC period did not begin as a rigid political mouthpiece. Instead, it passed through a phase of debates and artistic experiments from the early PRC to the Great Leap Forward before devolving into repetitive, low-quality vehicles of political messaging under intensifying ideological pressures. Meanwhile, by focusing on happiness as a central affect in these children’s films, this article reveals that the redefinition of childhood happiness marked a departure from the May Fourth–era evolutionary thinking and child-centered approach, giving rise to a revolutionary discourse rooted in collective labor essential for socialist construction.

This paper traces the rise and fall of the Great Wall Film Company, a company that had its own unique philosophy of film production and exerted a great influence in the first years of Chinese cinema. Its authors have unearthed many primary archival materials related to the company. Adopting the perspective of the history of film companies and overseas Chinese studies, it undertakes a preliminary discussion of the establishment, development, and end of the Changcheng Film Company as well as its business philosophy and lessons. Finally, it puts forward some new explanations for the establishment of the ‘Changcheng School’.

Intersecting Chinese cinema studies and film festival studies, this article inquiries into the (re)invention and growing significance of qingnian dianying (‘youth cinema’) on the Chinese film festival scene since the mid-2010s—a period we approach as the ‘post-independent’—through a close examination of the FIRST International Film Festival. The article first uses the idea of ‘post-independent Chinese cinema’ to re-examine the contemporary cinematic field, wherein an understanding regarding the in-betweenness of Chinese independent cinema (duli dianying) and art cinema (yishu dianying) helps to contextualize our study of FIRST. Qingnian dianying is approached as a set of discourses and practices centring around the ‘networked auteurism’, which underscores the institutional configurations of the film festival network and the logic of project that the emerging film auteur correlates with and works through. In our case study of FIRST, we turn to the performativity of qingnian dianying to examine a series of festival activities wherein auteurism is articulated and realized via working through a cycle of film projects. Overall, this research foregrounds qingnian dianying as a symptom as well as a mechanism to understand contemporary Chinese cinema in transition in relation to the domestic film industry, cultural policies and the global film festival network.

This article reconsiders the mediation of urban noises and decadent music in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s long-overlooked film Daughter of the Nile (1987) under the dual contexts of noise control and popular entertainment in the late 1980s in Taiwan. It argues that the film embeds distinctive sounds in urban environments to create acousmatic soundscapes that are typically considered ambient noises in mainstream discourse. It further observes that the film provides a critical entry point to the historical debates over the definition and governance of noise at the time, complicating an overdetermined concept throughout the history of sonic perception. Offering a framework to understand the film’s mediation of Taipei’s urban soundscapes, the article suggests that the film implies an ethics of listening that calls for a more careful attention to the multifarious sounds that reflect the power dynamics between the authority and the residents in the city.

This article examines queer Chinese filmmaker Fan Popo’s fiction films and curatorial practices since he moved from Beijing to Berlin in 2017. It focuses on how Fan’s subject position as queer Asian diaspora impacts on his filmmaking, identity and politics. In doing so, this article offers a critical insight into how people in the queer Asian diaspora use digital media and films to articulate their identity and politics. It also delineates the conditions and possibilities of the activist use of digital video and film in a transnational and diasporic context. By examining the continuities and discontinuities of Fan’s digital filmmaking and screen activism, this article argues that Fan’s recent adoption of the queer Asian diaspora identity has facilitated a context-specific, transnational, intersectional and transversal queer politics. It also showcases how digital video and film, situated in a transnational and diasporic context and used for political and activist purposes, can help articulate a more capacious understanding of Chineseness and queerness.