Elizabeth Wijaya is Assistant Professor of East Asian Cinema in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto-Mississauga. She is working on a book manuscript titled Luminous Flesh: The Visible and Invisible Worlds of Trans-Chinese Cinema. The work examines post-2008 films from Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan and Hong Kong, paying attention to how the political and philosophical stakes of how the past is transmitted, corporeally and temporally. Working at the intersection of cinema, philosophy and area studies, she is especially interested in the material and symbolic entanglements between East Asia and Southeast Asia cinema. She co-edited a special issue of Parallax (2016) to which she also contributed an article. Her co-directorial debut narrative feature-length film I Have Loved (Singapore/Cambodia, 2011) competed in various international film festivals including the 15th Shanghai International Film Festival and represented Singapore at the Asia-Pacific Screen Awards 2012.
Conventionally, a world premiere happens once—with the premiere being a commodity chased by festivals that seek quantifiable exclusivity and “discoveries.” With the pandemic, film releases have been upended, with restrictions to virtual releases that include geo-blocking. This impacts not only financials and access but also fundamental questions of what a film is, and its proliferated existence as it is disseminated across platforms. Beyond cinematic moments that emphasize the intermixing of modalities and forms of media, intermediality understood as a spectrum of relations across media is not an inevitable but an innate destiny of cinema. In other words, cinema’s potential to transgress media boundaries and re-invent itself is made more visible under pandemic conditions that has intensified discourses on the material conditions of cinema. Still, contradictions remain between the bodily vulnerabilities of the people behind-the-scenes, the continued impingement of the national in film productions, as well as the tensions between in-person bodies and digital files as quarantine-able/encrypt-able/censor-able media. The main case study is Vietnamese director Lê Bảo’s debut feature film Taste, which was shot in Vietnam from June 2019 to Sept 2019. Taste is a multi-region co-production by Vietnam, Singapore, France, Germany and Thailand with additional funding from Taiwan. Beginning from 2014, Taste participated in film initiatives and workshops in Vietnam, Singapore, France and Italy. This form of multi-year development, obtaining grants from government and private foundations across Asia and Europe, is becoming increasingly common among Southeast Asian independent filmmakers. Travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged this model of filmmaking, which often requires international post-production in order to fulfil grant spending requirements. The post-production for Taste started in Thailand and France and finished in Cambodia. The film premiered twice without the filmmakers in attendance: first, virtually for jury, press, and industry in March 2021 at the Berlinale Film Festival’s Industry Event; and second, for the public at the unprecedented open-air Berlinale Summer Special in June 2021; and is banned in Vietnam while scheduled for a regionally-restricted release on the streaming platform, MUBI. From a scene in the film where characters in an isolated house hold onto a TV as they sing along to a song, to the navigation of national boundaries in its path to becoming a film—thinking intermediality through the example of Taste reveals how the bodies of spectators, creators, performers, and the film itself are cross-implicated in the conflicting worlds of a “world premiere.”