10/15/2026
About the talk
As “hyphenated people” (Chow 1993) and “Taiwanese new immigrants” (Robinson 2020), Chinese diasporic and Southeast Asian directors making films in Taiwan today embody a transnational dimension of Taiwan New Cinema (first wave, 1982–9; second wave, 1990–), raising questions about gender, identity, queerness, migration, mobility, and more crucially, the global structures that fund, produce, circulate, and exhibit world cinema. Their internationally co-produced and circulated films materialize these flows of capital and people, while film festivals mediate their reception and reposition Taiwan geopolitically toward Southeast Asia, renegotiating the island’s uncertain and ambiguous national identity. This talk approaches film festivals as a theoretical framework for understanding how Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, and Midi Z came to represent Taiwan through international circulation and reception. Situating Taiwan New Cinema within this exhibition context, Beth Tsai also considers its persistent feminist caliber within the nation’s cultural imaginary and slow-cinema aesthetics, focusing on female flâneurs in Hou’s city films as a case study.
About the speaker
Beth Tsai is the author of Taiwan New Cinema at Film Festivals (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). Her research focuses primarily on the cinema of Taiwan, film festivals, and transnational film theory. She has published in the New Review of Film and Television Studies, International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Journal of Asian Cinema, China Perspectives, Taiwan Lit, and Oxford Bibliographies. She has also contributed many chapters to edited collections, most recently to the Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Film & Media Studies at Hunter College in New York.
