Li Ying’s Films of Displacement

Abstract

This chapter turns to a long-term Chinese resident in Japan, Li Ying, and frames two of Li’s earlier documentaries, 2H (1999) and Aji (2003), as ‘films of displacement’. This study situates Li Ying’s independent filmmaking at the conjuncture of Sinophone cinema and diasporic filmmaking. I argue how these documentaries have explored and archived transhistorical and transnational affective connections traversing various Sinophone and diasporic communities within Japan and beyond. We could, therefore, envision a Chinese-in-Japan cinema which, loosely assembling contemporary film and media works by Chinese-in-Japan filmmakers who have arrived in Japan since the mid-1980s, challenges us to question its unwritten historiography and to rethink Sino/PRC-Japanese transnational cinema.