Once, people who "went over" crossed the sea to make a living, seeing Nanyang as a foreign land and their native place as where they would return. Their descendants grew up among the many languages, ethnic groups and national experiences of Southeast Asia; the marks of the ancestral home they inherited kept changing through long mixing, producing new identities and expressions.
Philip Cheah understands "New Nanyang" as a historical turn: from the survival needs and thoughts of return of early emigrants to individual consciousness, local identity and cultural blending in independent nations. "New Nanyang" is neither a settled film genre nor a sharply bounded academic definition, but a way of looking that he proposed for KwanTeo.
What "New Nanyang" attends to are the films and filmmakers that grow out of this meeting: stories shaped by different languages (and dialects) and local experiences, and film practices that cross regional, linguistic and ethnic boundaries. "Nanyang" here is both the world where Chinese migrants arrived and put down roots, and a place where many cultures meet and keep being remade.
In this light, the veteran Hong Kong film researcher Law Kar will look back at "old Nanyang stories" from film history; Philip Cheah, a champion of Asian cinema, will share his observations and understanding of "New Nanyang"; and the Singaporean director of Teochew descent Ang Geck Geck and the Thai director of Teochew descent Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke will bring Ah Girl and A Useful Ghost and talk about making them. Both are their first features.
When "sending money home" is no longer the main tie between a new generation of Southeast Asian Chinese and their ancestral land, and when Nanyang is no longer "far away", what new views and experiences, beyond nostalgia or curiosity, will arrive back in China?
Welcome to New Nanyang.
This practitioners' salon invites Law Kar and Philip Cheah to each give a talk on "Nanyang". Both have long worked in film research, curating and cultural promotion; they witnessed the forming of the networks of Asian film culture and keep fostering exchanges between regions, generations and filmmakers. From decades of practice, they will tell how films are discovered, organised and spread, and how they are understood anew in different historical contexts and cultural settings.
