Independent Cinema in China: State, Market and Film Culture

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Censored, marginalized and largely inaccessible, independent cinema in the People's Republic of China is widely recognised as an important achievement of recent Chinese cinema. It functions as a dynamic force to challenge the concepts of art, truth, reality and ethics constructed in official discourses and to explore alternative spaces, places, voices, and images that have been ignored or distorted in mainstream media. However, following a nationwide shut-down of independent film festivals and organizations in the PRC since 2012, there is a real danger that these works and the material culture surrounding them may disappear. This project aims to preserve independent films made in the PRC in the past three decades and to conduct comprehensive research into this unique but under-researched film culture. This four-year international project is led by film scholars from UK and China (Sabrina Qiong Yu, Newcastle University; Chris Berry, King's College London; Luke Robinson, Sussex University; Xianmin Zhang, Beijing Film Academy), all active researchers and steadfast advocates of Chinese independent cinema who have excellent personal and professional connections with Chinese independent film circles, and supported by a Research Assistant. We will work closely with a large number of independent filmmakers and curators as well as a range of industry partners, supported by a multi-national Advisory Board comprised of 10 prominent filmmakers, curators and academics of Chinese independent cinema around the world. We want to understand how Chinese independent cinema has been produced, circulated and received, as well as how its relationship to the state and the market has shaped this cinema. To that end, we will conduct a questionnaire-based survey of 200 independent filmmakers and semi-structured interviews with 25 selected representative directors. We will also survey audiences for independent films and interview other stakeholders such as the curators of film festivals and the CEOs of film companies/funds which are committed to the production and distribution of independent films. We will communicate the findings to academic audiences via a monograph, an academic conference and a subsequent anthology, academic journal articles and conference panels/papers.We will launch the first Chinese independent film archive in Europe in which a rare collection of Chinese independent films and a disappearing film production and exhibition culture are preserved. It will not only safeguard cultural heritage for future generations, but also keep an 'alternative', faithful record of social changes and historical trauma in socialist and post-socialist China that is unobtainable elsewhere. We will advocate the use of independent films, documentaries in particular, as first-hand sources for research on and teaching of modern China within higher education. The first Chinese independent film online database, a YouTube channel and other digital platforms will be set up to enhance awareness of Chinese independent films and stimulate interest in the archive. The project will also benefit non-academic communities such as filmmakers, film industries and the general public. To enable this, we will collaborate with leading industry partners Sheffield Doc/Fest and CNEX in China to hold a Sheffield Doc/Fest-CNEX Documentary Summit in Beijing and panel discussions on UK-China co-production at Sheffield Doc/Fest in the UK. We will curate a UK film tour together with local art-house cinemas in four different UK cities as well as China Visual Festival (London), Chinese Film Forum (Manchester), and the Institute for Screen Industries Research at Nottingham University. To mark the launch of the film archive, there will be a film week at Newcastle's Tyneside Cinema, a symposium at Newcastle University, and a multi-media exhibition on the history of Chinese independent cinema over three decades at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead.