Indie Chinese Cinema Week Roundtable Discussion:
Time: November 19th, 14:00-15:30 CET
Venue: Filmrauschpalast, Lehrter Str. 35, 10557 Berlin （tbd）
Live Streaming Platform: TBD
C/LENS is a Berlin-based, non-profit film curation project that explores the potential of cinema as a space for transcultural dialogues, through the showcase of rarely exhibited Chinese independent films.
Convenor’s Statement
In the post-COVID era, while China’s isolation from the world creates epistemological challenges, independent cinema offers a rare glimpse of its reality today. As the prelude to the Indie Chinese Cinema Week, this roundtable invites an experienced Chinese female filmmaker and four engaging scholars from anthropology, sociology, cultural studies of China to have a dialogue revolving around the concepts of “female gaze” and “subaltern speak”.
The questions we would like to address include: How do female filmmakers break through a male-dominant industry? When transformed from the gazed object to the gazing subject, what do female filmmakers see through their camera lens and what are our expectations of their work? What is ‘female gaze’ in in relation to China’s rising feminist movements? In a time of political depression and routinised precarity, who is China’s ‘subaltern’ today and where are their voices? What are the relationship between women and the subaltern? What kind of subaltern and female representations do we need? We hope the open roundtable will bring scholarly, artistic and cinematic reflections into synergies and create new dynamics for public debates.
Guest speakers：
Danting Chen, Independent filmmaker
Dr Heike Frick, Cultural Studies scholar, Free University Berlin
Prof Biao Xiang, Anthropologist, Max Planck Institute
Prof Sabrina Yu, Film scholar, Newcastle University
Dr Yunyun Zhou, Feminist sociologist, University of Oslo