The speaker, Chun Chun (Isha)Ting, is Research fellow at IIAS at University of Leiden. She will discuss how Hong Kong cinema, in the hands of a younger generation, gives expression to a whole range of issues and sentiments unfamiliar to its tradition. 

This first part of the talk will give an overview of some of the important social movements that took place in Hong Kong in the last twenty years, focusing on the contentious issues of urban renewal, infrastructure building, national education, economic integration, and the struggle for universal suffrage. The second part of the talk will turn to Hong Kong cinema as a repository of social discontent and a collective structure of feeling. Using examples such as The Way We Keep Dancing (2021), Drifting (2021), The Sunny Side of the Street (2022), Lost Love (2023), The Sparring Partners (2022), A Guilty Conscience (2023), Dr Ting will discuss how Hong Kong cinema, in the hands of a younger generation, gives expression to a whole range of issues and sentiments unfamiliar to its tradition: from spatial contestation and the claiming for the right to the city, social marginalization and economic precarity, inter-generational and ideological rupture, to the crisis facing the rule of the law... She argues that as a cinema of discontent, Hong Kong films, in the age of the National Security Law, strive to represent the social reality undergirding the political turmoil of the past two decades. Taken together, it also articulates an ethics of care towards its people, city, and the world at large that is radically different from the traditional ethos of Hong Kong cinema, and which, she argues, comes directly from the experience of the city's incessant social movements. 

Chun Chun Isha Ting is Research fellow at IIAS, previously Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Ting received her PhD from the University of Chicago, she is currently working on her manuscript on the social movements and artistic activism in post-handover Hong Kong. Focusing on how urban space is represented culturally and contested politically in contemporary Hong Kong, her project aims to examine the urban condition that nurtures identity and citizenship, and explore the changing contour of the Hong Kong people's political subjectivities. Ting also writes more generally on contemporary Sinophone literature and cinema, especially migrant workers’ literature and culture in contemporary China. Her writing has appeared in positions: Asia critique, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, among others.

Conférence organisée dans le cadre du cours « Chine postsocialiste et mondialisation : dynamiques politiques et sociales », Master LLO, Chine-Japon.

+ d'infos

Eric Florence

Autres conférences liées : 

15/11 : Reflecting on ten years of LGBTQ activism in China and on the way ahead  

29/11 La Chine en ligne. Comment les ouvriers chinois documentent leur vie quotidienne et partagent leurs émotions sur les plateformes ? 

Avec le soutien du Département des sciences de l’Antiquité de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres