General Editors
Sabrina Qiong Yu is Senior Lecturer in Chinese and Film at Newcastle University, UK. Her research and publications focus on Chinese independent cinema, stardom and performance, gender and sexuality, and audience/reception studies. She is the author of Jet Li: Chinese Masculinity and Transnational Film Stardom (2012&2015) and the editor, with Guy Austin, of Revisiting Star Studies: Cultures, Themes and Methods (2017&2018). She is leading a four-year project (2019-2023) on Chinese independent cinema as Principal Investigator, funded by UK Arts & Humanities Research Council. She regularly curates Chinese indie film events and is committed to promoting Chinese independent cinema in the UK.
Luke Robison is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. He is the author of Independent Chinese Documentary: From the Studio to the Street (2013), and the editor, with Chris Berry, of Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation (2017). His writing on Chinese-language feature film, animation, documentary, and film festivals has appeared in many books and journals. He is also Co-investigator of AHRC-funded project on Chinese independent cinema (2019-2023).
Associate Editors
Hongwei Bao is Associate Professor in Media Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK, where he also directs the Centre for Contemporary East Asian Cultural Studies. His research primarily focuses on queer cultures in contemporary China, including queer films, filmmakers, and film festivals. He is the author of Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China (NIAS Press, 2018) and Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture under Postsocialism (Routledge, 2020).
Li Tiecheng is a lecturer and filmmaker at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include Chinese and international independent film studies, documentary studies and film education. In 2014, he obtained a grant from the Sumitomo Foundation to research the influence of Ogawa Shinsuke on the development of independent documentary in China and Hong Kong, and in 2016 he obtained a grant from CUHK for the project “Rebuilding Historical Narrative in Chinese Independent Documentary Filmmaking.” His documentaries My Film (2010) and Brother Wah (2013) were screened in the 15th IFVA and the 6th Chinese Documentary Festival respectively.
Li Xiaofeng is Professor at the College of Arts & Media in Tongji University, Shanghai, a documentary filmmaker and a poet. His documentaries include Ballad of Roaming Spirits (2019), The Shoe Shiner’s Journey (2016), Gold Underground (2011), My Last Secret (2008), Pedaling Father (2007), Walk in the Dark (2005), and Spring Gong (2001). His publications include Direct Cinema as a Filing Method (Tongji University Press 2012), Documentary Filmmaking (co-authored with Jia Kai, China International Broadcasting Press 2017), and a collection of poems Fierce Floods and Savage Beasts in the Dream (2015).
Flora Lichaa is Maître de Conférences (Senior Lecturer) in Chinese Studies at the University of Rennes 2 (FR). Her PhD dissertation entitled “Documentary in China (1905-2017): Between Artistic Autonomy and Political Concerns” received a thesis prize from the French Association of Chinese Studies. After her PhD, she started a new research project on Contemporary Chinese Art Cinema during her Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship at the ULB Centre for East Asian Studies in Brussels. She was the Director of the Shadows Chinese Independent Film Festival in Paris from 2009 to 2015, and has curated numerous screenings and lectures related to Chinese cinema in academic and cultural institutions.
Ma Ran is Associate professor at Nagoya University, Japan. Her research interests include East Asian independent cinemas and film festival studies. She is currently working on the subjective filmmaking in postwar Japan. Ma is the author of Independent Filmmaking across Borders in Contemporary Asia (Amsterdam University Press, 2019). Besides research, she is also a film critic and reporter, and has organised screening events of Asian independent cinema at Osaka, Beijing, and Nagoya.
JP Sniadecki is an anthropologist-filmmaker whose work includes El Mar La Mar (2017), The Iron Ministry (2014), Yumen (2013), People’s Park (2012), Foreign Parts (2010), and Demolition (2008). In collaboration with Zhu Rikun, he runs a 16mm film workshop in Songzhuang, Beijing, China. He is a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, and Associate Professor and the Director of the MFA program in Documentary Media at Northwestern University, USA.
Wang Xiaolu is Senior Researcher at China Film Archive, Beijing, and a film critic and curator. He obtained his PhD from Beijing Film Academy and his research focuses on documentary films and the history of Chinese cinema. He has published three books including Film and the Disease of Our Time: Witnessing Independent Film Culture (2008), The Politics of the Cinema (2014) and The Will of the Cinema (2019). He is also a columnist for The Economic Observer and Southern Weekly.
Yang Yishu is Professor at Shanghai Film Academy in Shanghai University, China. She taught at Nanjing University between 2007 and 2019. She started filmmaking in 2002 and her main works include two documentaries Who is Haoran? (2006) and On the Road (2010), and two fictional films One Summer (2014) and Lush Reeds (2018). She has published the monography Film Within Film: Study of Meta-Film (2012), and her research focuses on cultural studies, film studies and gender studies.
Zhang Zanbo is an independent filmmaker and writer. His documentary films include Falling from the Sky (2009), A Song of Love, Maybe (2010), The Interceptor from My Hometown (2011) and The Road (2015). He has published non-fiction book The Road: Low-speed Life in High-speed China (2014, 2015) in Taiwan and China.
Jinyan Zeng, scholar, writer, and documentary filmmaker, is a Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Haifa, Israel. Her research and creativity interests focus on culture and politics; intellectual identity and social activism; poem and documentary film; gender and sexuality; and ethnicity with particular emphasis on China. She produced and co-directed Prisoners in Freedom City with Hu Jia (2007) and Outcry and Whisper (2020) with Wen Hai and Trish McAdam, wrote the script for A Poem to Liu Xia (Trish McAdam, 2015), and produced We the Workers (Wen Hai, 2017).