Most of the papers in this issue were the outcome of ‘Transgressing Tibet: International Symposium on Pema Tseden's Films, Fictions and Translations’ held at the Hong Kong Baptist University in October 2014. Pema Tseden has come to attend the symposium and participated in the seminars in dialogue with other filmmakers, accompanied with numbers of public screening of his works in Hong Kong Asian Film Festival. In this special issue, Pema Tseden's films have been closely analyzed in terms of road movie, minor cinema, Buddhist film, palimpsest and contested landscapes. Carefully examining the special film languages and cinematic styles in various works of Pema Tseden, these essays concur that this emerging filmmaker from Amdo has opened up a new field of ambiguities, tensions, complexities, contradictions and mediation about the fast-changing Tibet that the long-established binarism of tradition and modernity, resistance and domination, local and national, or inside and external can no longer capture. Not only will the category of ‘minority nationality film’ (shaoshu minzu dianying) in the PRC be redefined, Pema Tseden's oeuvre may pose challenge to the concept of contemporary Chinese cinema as a whole. By examining the details of these films in relation to the issues including identity and (self-)representation of minority experience, these essays provide vital links to our understanding. They illustrate how Pema Tseden has not only coped with the constraints of his creative situation, including the isolation of Tibet, political censorship and the economic requirements of the cinematic form, but also transformed them into powerful visual images of the isolated human psyche in its quest.
Special issue on Wu Wenguang
Julian WardThe two papers included in this issue on recent documentaries from China were inspired by a series of events on the pioneering work of Wu Wenguang and others held at the University of Edinburgh from 25 to 29 November 2014. The event was attended by Wu Wenguang, along with Zou Xueping and Zhang Mengqi, two of the directors working on the Memory Project, which is carrying out the vital work of recording the impact at village level of the three years of famine between 1959 and 1961. Audiences were treated to screenings and discussion, and a keynote speech from Prof. Paul Pickowicz. Here, Huang Xuelei examines works by Jia Zhitan, who is a participant in the Villager Documentary Project, while Prof. Pickowicz presents the take of a historian on the work of Zou Xueping in the context of the legacy of the New Culture Movement.