ASIAN CINEMA RESEARCH LAB

News

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Conference

Destination Hong Kong: South Korean Cinema’s Encounter with Chinese-Language Cinemas

“Destination Hong Kong: South Korean Cinema’s Encounter with Chinese-Language Cinemas” conference is organized by the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong in partnership with Korean Film Archive (KOFA) and Asian Cinema Research Lab (ACR Lab). This conference will explore how South Korean cinema was shaped by a trans-regional network that included the cinemas of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and mainland China from the 1950s to the twenty-first century. The two-day conference will bring together leading and emerging scholars and experts of South Korean and Asian cinemas from the Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North America, to present their research findings and new developments in theory and methodology.

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Book Talk

Asian Cinema Research Lab (ACR Lab) Book Talk: Global Entanglements Bong Joon Ho’s Cinematic Geographies

This talk is a retrospective examination of the entire body of work of the renowned South Korean film director, Bong Joon Ho, looking specifically at the way in which his films thematize social entanglements at various scales. The scalar focus in these treatments ranges from the micro to macro, from the local idiosyncrasies of a Korean apartment complex in which neighbors get on each other’s nerves to global systems of commerce and exchange in which multinational corporations compete in increasingly cut-throat markets. We may think of Bong Joon Ho’s body of work as offering a capacious geography that spatializes in film the complex web of social entanglements that shape life in the 21st century, and all this from the perspective of late capitalist South Korea, which turns out to offer special insight into our contemporary historical moment.

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Conference

New Directions in Trans-Asian Cinema and Media Studies City University of Hong Kong – New York University Joint Symposium

Asian cinema studies has rapidly expanded under the impact of globalization, compounded by the resurgence of varied nationalisms, resistance movements, and the affordances of digital media. Differentiated experiences of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic have further heightened interest in local politics and cultural activism, newer media and the
digital everyday, and a renewed geopolitical divide between East and West and between North and South. A new “companion” to Asian cinemas therefore feels necessary and urgent in these times. This collaborative volume takes up emerging questions in the field to weave a model for a “trans-Asian” film studies that is cognizant of the durability of the nation state as well as alternative models of situated multiscalar ideas of place and belonging.

“New Directions in Trans-Asian Cinema and Media Studies” symposium is organized by the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong in partnership with the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Asian Film & Media Initiative (AFMI), and Asian Cinema Research Lab (ACR Lab). This symposium is a subsequent event for the publication of The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas, a massive volume of Asian cinema studies, which was edited by Zhang Zhen, Sangjoon Lee, Intan Paramaditha, and Debashree Mukherjee.

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News

Call for Papers: Launch Symposium of the Association for Curators and Programmers of Asian Cinemas (ACPAC)

Call for Papers: Launch Symposium of the Association for Curators and Programmers of Asian Cinemas (ACPAC)

Rethinking Film Curation in Asian Cinemas
Date: 4-6 September 2025 | Location: Asian Film Archive, Singapore

The Association for Curators and Programmers of Asian Cinemas (ACPAC) is delighted to announce its launch symposium, Rethinking Film Curation in Asian Cinemas. This event is co-hosted with the Asian Film Archive (AFA) in Singapore and sponsored by Newcastle University, UK.

ACPAC was established as part of the research project Decolonising Film Curation: Asian Cinemas as Method, funded by Newcastle University. The Asian Film Archive (AFA), an institution dedicated to promoting Asian cinema and nurturing the development of film programmers, organises screenings, activities, and events to foster a deeper appreciation for Asian cinema. With its commitment to advancing understanding and growth in the field, the AFA supports ACPAC’s efforts and is keen to be the platform for this symposium.

The launch symposium aims to bring together film curators, programmers, other industry professionals, and scholars to address the following key and pressing questions related to the field of film curation in light of technological advancements and shifts in global geopolitics.

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Book Talk

Asian Cinema Research Lab (ACR Lab) Book Talk: “Hong Kong Crime Films”

What were Hong Kong crime films like before they became a local, regional, and eventually global success story? How did colonial film censors influence the development of Hong Kong genre cinema, and the crime film in particular? And how can we think through the relationship between crime films and their social context? In this talk, Kristof Van den Troost will discuss these questions and other topics covered in his recent book, Hong Kong Crime Films: Criminal Realism, Censorship and Society, 1947-1986 (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).

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News

Netflix and South Korean Media In a Globalizing World conference

Thank you! Your support helped make Netflix and South Korean Media in a Globalizing World Conference a big success. Thank you very much for coming to our conference from South Korea, the US, Canada, Paris, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

The papers delivered at the conference will be compiled and published as part of Brill’s “Youth in a Globalizing World” series. The book is expected to be published in early 2026.

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News

Call for Papers: ASEACC 2025 Sustainable futures: ecologies, kinships, and communities in Southeast Asian Cinemas

The 12th Biennial Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference will take place at Chiang Mai University, on 14 – 16 August 2025.

The focus of the conference is Sustainable Futures: ecologies, kinships and communities in Southeast Asian Cinemas. This theme will be addressed from a broad range of perspectives in order to encourage critical engagement with current debates in film theory and the environmental humanities, inviting papers that theorize the diverse film and media practices across Southeast Asia including new developments in artists’ moving image, video art, VR, and activist media.

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