CIN210H5

Contemporary Southeast Asian Cinemas

This course is an introduction to contemporary Southeast Asian cinemas from the 2000s to the present. Since the turn of the millennium, the cinematic innovation of Southeast Asia has been aided by an increase in productive interaction and transnational modes of collaborations and co-productions. These waves of cinema augur new possibilities for considering cross-cultural, cross-boundary ways of being, seeing and knowing that can challenge formulaic and essentialist understandings of the region. Through formal aesthetic analysis of short and feature-length films, and the study of Asia-based and international institutions of cinema, we will examine the multifarious potential of contemporary Southeast Asian in spurring the rethinking of the histories, concepts, and borders of the region.