CfP: The Rural Gaze: Independent Filmmaking in Contemporary China – Chinese Independent Cinema Observer Issue 923.1.2026 {en}
This special issue invites critical and creative contributions that explore how Chinese independent cinema engages with the countryside as both a site of representation and a mode of seeing. The rural has long been a central theme in Chinese film history, often idealized, politicized, or romanticized. “Going to the countryside” has been both a distinctively modern experience and a continuous practice in China. Since the early twentieth century, intellectuals, reformers, revolutionaries, leftist journalists, and idealistic youth have frequently traversed the widening divide between city and countryside (Yu Zhang, 2020). Since the 1990s, independent filmmakers have also returned to the countryside with a renewed sense of urgency, documenting its profound transformations under the pressures of modernization, migration, and ecological change.
We take the concept of the “rural gaze” to examine not only how rural spaces are filmed, but also how the countryside becomes a visual and affective language in independent cinema. Who is doing the seeing, how and what do they see, and how are rural people, landscapes, and lives positioned in these cinematic encounters? How do independent films challenge, reproduce, or reimagine dominant narratives of rural China?
We welcome submissions from scholars, critics, filmmakers, and curators. Contributions may take the form of academic essays, interviews, artist statements, visual materials, or experimental formats. Topics may include (but are not limited to):
- Rural Memory, Displacement, and Post-Socialist Transformation
- Gender, Sexuality, Aging, Labor, and Migration in Rural Narratives
- Representations of Rural Environment, Education, and Public Health in Independent Cinema
- Independent Documentaries and Ethnographic Modes of Rural Representation
- Cinematic Landscapes and Visual Aesthetics of the Countryside
- Rural Spiritual Life, Christianity, and Local Cosmologies
- Village-Based Production and Grassroots Filmmaking
- Archival Gaps and Informal Histories of Rural China
- Circulation and Reception of Independent Rural Cinema
- Comparative Ruralities in Sinophone and Global Independent Film
- Independent Film and Its Differences from Television Series or Short-Form Media (e.g., TikTok) in Representing the Rural
- Dialogues between Independent Rural Cinema and Rural Literature or Nonfiction Wring
Submission and questions:
This issue is scheduled to be published in December 2026. Please submit your full articles by 30 June, 2026. If you have any questions or suggestions about this special issue, please contact the issue editors. Submissions should be emailed directly to the issue’s executive editor
Dr Jing Li at cifa.ruralgaze[at]gmail.com and CIFA at cifacontact[at]gmail.com.
Further information: https://www.chinaindiefilm.org/chinese-independent-cinema-observer-issue-9-call-for-papers-the-rural-gaze-independent-filmmaking-in-contemporary-china/.
Source: Chinese Independent Cinema Observer Issue 9 CFP: The Rural Gaze: Independent Filmmaking in Contemporary China, H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US.
