Luke Robinson (University of Sussex)
Midi Z is an ethnically Chinese, Burmese-born filmmaker, who is now a Taiwanese national. His “Homecoming Trilogy” is a trio of low budget digital features, shot unofficially in Northern Myanmar in the wake of the country’s transition away from military rule. Stylistically and thematically, the trilogy demonstrates the influence of Zhao’s mentor, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, with whom the filmmaker studied in Taipei. This manifests in the use of the long take “slow cinema” style for which Hou is famous, as well as an interest in problems of modernization and urbanization. But the trilogy is also distinct from the Taiwan New Cinema model represented by Hou in key ways. Zhao intersperses Hou’s long takes and still camerawork with handheld shots, tracking shots, and close-ups that are recognised tropes of low budget digital cinema globally. In addition, Zhao’s films focus on stories of drug and people smuggling between Myanmar, Thailand, Taiwan, and the PRC—narratives distinctly lacking from Hou’s cinema.
This paper argues that Zhao’s departures from the Taiwan New Cinema aesthetic reflect how digital filmmaking has blurred the boundaries between “national” cinema practices in East and Southeast Asia. The trilogy is the product of minor transnational networks connecting Taiwan and Southeast Asia that are both made possible in part by the emergence of low cost, high quality digital cameras, and are inherently unstable. The films in turn reflect upon these conditions of production. Zhao’s narratives of smuggling imagine a “grey economy” network of people and commodities that connect Myanmar, Thailand, Taiwan, and the PRC, while exploring the obstacles encountered by human labour and commodities as they enter the peripheral networks that connect these countries. Cinematographically, Zhao borrows and departs from the Taiwan New Cinema aesthetic as a way of exploring, formally, the unstable, blocked networks mapped by the trilogy’s narratives—but which also constitute the film’s condition of production. Ultimately, this pushes us to deterritorialize the “slow cinema” aesthetic so closely associated with the Taiwanese New and post-New Wave cinema, and reconfigure it not as “national cinema,” but as a local response to global conditions that Zhao is reworking with the help of digital technology.
Luke Robinson is Lecturer in Film Studies in the Department of Media and Film, University of Sussex, UK. He is the author of Independent Chinese Documentary: From the Studio to the Street (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and the co-editor of Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). His book chapters and articles on Chinese-language feature film, animation, documentary, and film festivals can be found in DV-made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film, The New Chinese Documentary Movement: For the Public Record, The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics, positions: asia cultures critique, Film Studies, Journal of Children and Media, and Journal of Chinese Cinemas.