Date: 13 October 2015 (Tue)
Time: 4:30pm – 6:00pm
Venue: G24, Fung King Hey Building, CUHK
Speaker: Prof. Helen Hok-Sze Leung (Simon Fraser University)
Moderator: Prof. Vivian Lee (City University of Hong Kong)
Language: English
Registration: goo.gl/forms/UtBP8FvR0D
As “Hollywood North,” Vancouver has long served as a versatile site for runaway productions, generating more than $1 billion in annual revenue for the province. Its recent high-profile “role” as Pyongyang in The Interview may be symbolic of a newer ambition: to play Asia, or at least become North America’s cinematic “gateway” to Asia and vice versa. Initiatives such as the provincial government’s courting of a Bollywood film award show to be hosted in Vancouver in 2013 and the Vancouver International Film Festival’s high-profile hosting of Japanese pop stars at film premiers in 2014 illustrate how state and industry efforts to pursue connections with Asia also impact urban culture on the ground, turning, if only for one night, BC Place into a Mumbai arena flanked by screaming Bollywood fans and the Vancouver Centre for Performing Arts into a J-Pop mob scene. At the same time, it is frequently lamented that Vancouver “never plays itself” on screen. Most often, it serves as “no place” or “any place” for foreign film productions that value the city’s tax incentive, skilled labour force, and convenient time zone more than its distinctive cultural character. This lecture examines Vancouver’s transpacific film initiatives and their significance for the city’s economic as well as cultural aspirations. It takes a close-up look at the works of Holiday Pictures, an independent production company that has been striking an interesting balance between line producing Asian films, negotiating Asia-Canada co-productions, as well as nurturing local Asian Canadian filmmakers whose films use Vancouver as a setting rather than mere location. As Vancouver is so frequently referred to as an “Asian city” — due not only to its long history of Asian migration but also to its particular brand of Asian-inspired urbanism — the lecture will also explore the potential impact of these transpacific film initiatives on the city’s urban character, cultural identity, and sense of place.
Helen Hok-Sze Leung (BA, Oxford; MA, Ph.D. UW-Madison) is an Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University. She has published widely on queer cinema and is the author of Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong and Farewell My Concubine: A Queer Film Classics. She co-edits the Queer Asia book book series at HKUP and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas and TSQ:Transgender Studies Quarterly. She is currently working on the following research projects: Vancouver As Film Location: Transpacific Itineraries, which examines transpacific connections in Vancouver’s film and culture industries; The Sound of Queer Cinema, which explores queer cinema through sonic perspectives; and (co-authored with Audrey Yue) Queer Asia As Method, a study of the theoretical and methodological implications of queer Asian studies for the production of queer knowledge globally.
All are welcome. First-come, first served.
Organized by Centre for Cultural Studies, CUHK
Enquiry: 3943 1255 / cuccs@cuhk.edu.hk