Diasporama: Dead Air
Yau Ching / 1997 / 89 min / Cantonese and English / Chinese and English Subtitles
Silver Prize, Hong Kong Independent Film And Video Awards; Invited to Hong Kong International Film Festival; Film Forum, Los Angeles; Donnell Media Auditorium, New York Public Library
An average of 60,000 people emigrated from Hong Kong each year in early 1990s. An absolutely personal and biased sampling of this diaspora from an insider/outsider perspective just before the 1997 handover. Based on the personal experiences of individuals from Hong Kong in 1990s, Diasporama is an experimental documentary that addresses issues of the diasporic condition. In a series of intimate interviews that explore the relationship of the personal and the political, Yau Ching confronts notions of nationhood, identity, and post-colonialism. Inserting her own face and voice as a form of mediation, the artist herself becomes one of the subjects.
Publicly screened in Hong Kong in 1997.
References
Interview and response documentary from initium.com twenty years after, 13/06/2017
Taiwan Women Film’s Association Database: Diasporama: Dead Air
Hong Kong Actual Images Association
Diasporama: Dear Air, Hong Kong Documentary Retrospective: 1980-1997
Reviews
Alice Ming Wai Jim, “(Be)Longing: Ellen Pau, Yau Ching, Laiwan, and Xiu Li Young at Galerie Optica, Montreal,” FUSE, A Magazine about Issues of Art andCulture 20:4 (November 1997) 39-40.
Derek Mok, “The Importance of Being Independent.” Hong Kong Standard, July 11, 1997.
Distribution (with English subtitles)
Comments are closed.