How does East-Asian cultural coproduction work?
A case study from The Asian Docs Co-production Network Project

Abstract:
In East Asia, ‘[w]e are actually at an initial and critical stage of decolonization and deimperialization, which was made possible only by the arrival of the so-called post-cold-war era of globalization’, as Kuan-hsing Chen has put forward in his seminal book Asia as Method (2010). Building a platform for Asian scholars and students is urgent and crucial but cannot be achieved without overcoming deep-seated difficulties. For example, Japan’s diplomatic relations with its neighboring countries, particularly with Korea, have deteriorated severely and continually since the beginning of this century, as historical revisionism took hold of dominant positions in Japan’s domestic politics, education and media discourses. Nevertheless, various inter-Asia grassroots projects, some sponsored by public funds, were launched during the same period to foster a better relationship among Asian scholars and students, such as the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society (http://culturalstudies.asia/about-us/), Chen and his colleagues initiated, and of which I was a board member 2012–2018.

The Asian Docs Co-Production Network (ADCN) is a network of educators of documentary/art filmmaking in Asia, currently consisting of instructors, scholars, and practitioners from China, Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan. ADCN fosters collaborations among students in Asian territories. It provides opportunities for them to work together on documentary co-production projects cross-culturally. Financially, ADCN is independent and its backers are The DMZ International Documentary Film Festival (DMZ Docs, https://dmzdocs.com/eng/default.asp) in Korea and various educational funds in respective territories. The end results of ADCN are exhibited in the festival bi-annually. Up to the present, ADCN has produced four editions of short documentary films (approx. 15 films) by students.
In this talk, I shall discuss the case of a Korean-Japanese co-production film called Teleporting (2022). This autobiographical short documentary was made by four students from Korea and Japan, two from the Korean National University of the Arts and the other two from my department at Komazawa University in Tokyo. Their common denominator was their interest in girl/womanhood in their respective cultures and feminism. Teleporting (approx.20 minutes) will be shown during the seminar.

About the speaker:
Yoshiharu Tezuka, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Global Media Studies, Komazawa University, Tokyo, is a visiting scholar at our department. He has rich practical experience as a documentary filmmaker and producer, and he holds a Ph.D. in Media and Communications Studies from Goldsmith College, University of London. The thesis became his first monograph, Japanese Cinema Goes Global: Film Workers’ Journeys (Hong Kong UP, 2012).

Seminar chair: Jaqueline Berndt (jberndt@su.se)