Migratory Times presents a series of Chinese language fictional films showing transitional times in Southeast and East Asia. The settings of the films span the Ming dynasty, the Sino-Japanese war and its aftermath, colonial and postcolonial modernity, revolution and resistance and martial law in Taiwan.

Against the broad strokes of political history, these films reveal the internal conflicts, melodrama and class divisions of migratory lives in exile and alienation. The films themselves are also made
in critical times for cinema history with their own histories of loss, rebirth and restoration. As lives and desire collide with the forces of history in fictional frames, what can be revealed about the intersecting forces of production that condition how history can be affectively archived and re-activated in aesthetic works?

GUEST CURATOR
Dr Elizabeth Wijaya

Elizabeth Wijaya is a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures, University of Minnesota (Twin Cities). In Fall 2019, She will begin a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of East Asian Cinema at the Department of Visual Studies, University of Toronto (Mississauga) where she has received a seed grant to start an archive of Asian short films. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University in 2018 and is working on her book manuscript “Luminous Flesh, Haunted Futures: The Visible and Invisible Worlds of Chinese Cinema.” She is a co-founder of the Singapore-based development and production company, E&W Films.