So please welcome Dr. Luke Robinson.

Thank you. And good evening, everyone. As the title suggests, today I'm going to talk about independent Chinese documentary cinema and how it goes global. Independent cinema is a form of film production and circulation that's been present within the Chinese media ecosystem since the early 1990s. The expression signifies films made outside the state indoor studio systems and either refused release into domestic cinemas by the censors or never submitted to them for approval. So that is how I will be using the term this evening. By going global, I mean how these films enter exhibition and distribution circuits outside China and in particular Anglophone film markets. There's a long history of Chinese independent filmmakers collaborating with overseas partners of various kinds to produce fiction films for both domestic and international consumption. But one of the features of documentary filmmaking in China since the turn of this century has been the increasing involvement of foreign stakeholders in making work that is intended at least in part for overseas audiences. This is particularly true in relation to the growth of events we'd associate with the international documentary film industry. So that includes, for example, the pitching forum, where filmmakers go to present a film concept to potential investors, and the production workshop or seminar, where filmmakers work with industry professionals on a film in progress. While both of these fora have been established at officially approved film festivals in China, they've also started making inroads into independent filmmaking. And this for me raises two particularly interesting questions. First, how are these events shaping independent documentary filmmaking in the PRC? Overseas professionals trained in a commercial environment may come with a specific understanding of what makes a good documentary that are very different from those prevalent within Chinese independent documentary film culture, which historically has been resolutely anti-commercial. So, what are the consequences of these encounters for the films that come out of them? Second, how, if at all, might these developments impact the way that non-Chinese audiences respond to these films? This seems important because of the particular investments that viewers often have in non-fiction film, and particularly the idea that a documentary conveys certain empirical truths about its subject matter. If the involvement of overseas industry professionals is shifting the nature of independent Chinese documentary production, it's not impossible that this involvement is also transforming the way that viewers outside the PRC take kind of away or what they take away from those films. And at a time when China is obviously increasingly central to global politics and economics, that question seems to me one that is worth confronting. Today I'm going to address these questions through a particular case study that actually allows me to trace connections between film production, film form, and reception. And so that's the kind of structure that the lecture this evening will follow. Initially, I'm going to talk about a series of production training workshops run in China by the Sundance Institute's documentary film program in conjunction with C Next or China Next. Then I'm going to shift to talk about the documentary Plastic China, directed by a filmmaker called Wang Julian, who attended some of these workshops. And then I'll finish by discussing the ways in which audiences in the UK responded to Plastic China during a film tour that I helped organize in the autumn of 2019. The thread which connects these three stages is a specific non-fiction format, the character-driven story. Increasingly, this format's promoted as a way for Chinese independent documentary filmmakers to expedite the circulation of their films globally. As I'm going to explore, the format has its roots in what we can term an industrial humanitarian logic, a logic that encourages a particular kind of affective and empathetic response in viewers. Such a response has been argued to privilege individual action over structural critique. And I'm going to suggest today that based on our audience responses to the screenings of Wang's films that we did during this tour, this argument is fair. But I think in the context of actually screening films about China, we can push it further. In particular, I believe this affect sits within a broader liberal approach to what might be called the problem of China, that both positions the PRC as outside the established global political order and seeks to encourage the country inside that order by adapting the order's established norms. I call the structure of feeling associated with that position worrying about China. And it's broadly the response that I think the character-driven documentary format often encourages in overseas audiences when they're watching Chinese material. Ultimately, I'm interested in thinking about how Chinese independent film goes global, under what conditions, and with what consequences. And so to get us started, I'll turn first to the workshops co-organized by Cinex and the Sundance Institute's documentary film program. So CNEX is a pan-Chinese documentary production and exhibition platform based between Beijing, Hong Kong, and Taipei. It was established in 2006 by financiers Ben Xiang, Ruby Chen, and Zhang Zhawe, with input from Chen's husband, the Taiwanese filmmaker Su Xiaoming. Sundance is the famous non-profit organization established by Robert Reverend in 1981, which now manages a significant number of documentary programs in the US and overseas. In 2011, the two organizations set up China-based collaborative production workshops. The first took place over three days in Beijing's 798 complex, where the Cinex salon was located. It combined public panels, open to a general audience, with smaller private sessions focused on 11 Chinese documentary projects, selected via submission from C-Nex's contacts in the independent filmmaking community. These closed sessions ultimately became pitch workshops, where invited Sundance advisors, largely foreign industry professionals, provided the participating filmmakers with feedback on editing on kind of initial cuts of their work. In 2016, the Sundance Cinext documentary and story edit lab was added by Rick Perez, who took over the program from its original manner manager, Cara Matez. This was a private workshop focused on editing and narrative. And Sundance had already been running versions of these workshops in the USA for some years. When I interviewed Perez in Los Angeles in 2019, he described these workshops as having a dual purpose. First, to encourage the development of an independent documentary filmmaking community in the PRC. Second, to help these filmmakers, and here I quote, refine and advance the narrative and storytelling of their work. And this immediately raised two questions for me. How are narrative and storytelling understood here, given the many ways these forms can manifest? And why should cultivating them be important for independent Chinese documentary production? The film scholar Tong Shan connects these issues to what she argues were the primary aim of the Sundance Cinex workshops, facilitating the access of Chinese independent filmmakers to the global nonfiction market. Tong attended the workshops in 2016. Based on her observations, she suggests this access was not just about networking with the overseas industry guests invited by Sundance. It was also the goal of the practical suggestions made to filmmakers, including suggestions made by CNEX representatives. Participants were informed that a character-driven narrative, goal-oriented logic, and the dramatic arc of the three-act structure would ensure that their films were universally accessible. This accessibility would in turn increase the likelihood of selection by major global film festivals and expedite commercial deals with overseas distributors. Storytelling, in the sense of the classical Hollywood narrative, was therefore presented as a universal form through which Chinese filmmakers could transform their documentaries from local to global commodities. As Brett Stories recently noted, a story, as we have come to use that term, belongs, confers rights, can be exchanged, and is invested with value. A story is mine or it's yours. When we think of a story, then, we increasingly think of someone owning it. In this sense, it already constitutes the perfect property form. Clearly, these workshops use storytelling to shape documentary films so they might circulate more easily through global creative industry networks. More specifically, I think it's to facilitate access to the Anglophone market. Documentary filmmaking in North America especially has been dominated by character-driven storytelling since the turn of the millennium. But Sundance also understood these workshops as a civil society project. Perez described the Sundance Institute to me as being founded on freedom of expression and the independent artist and the independent voice. It's this voice that character-driven narrative is understood to help shape. Perez first encountered Chinese independent documentary at Cinex's own Taipei Pitch Forum in 2013. He said he was especially fascinated by the work of PRC filmmakers because of what he described as their spectrum of audacity, the range of their material from conservative to socially and politically challenging. He believed Sundance could help these directors articulate the story they were proposing to tell. So assist them to locate their subject vis-a-vis the bigger socio-political picture. Perez acknowledged that there will be differences between the narrative forms needed to address domestic and foreign viewers. He stressed that the three-act structure would mostly be needed, quote, if your goal, i.e., the filmmaker's goal, is to try to draw international attention to something that's going on in your country or story. End quote. Here, storytelling is crucial to nonfiction filmmaking, but not just as a means to monetization. It also galvanizes documentary's capacity for what Puja Rangans termed humanitarian intervention. In other words, the form's ability to mitigate the impact of a hostile or absent state, in this instance, by drawing global attention to the film's subject matter. Attracting such interest comes at a price, however, namely, conforming in style and substance to the ideological expectations of Western liberal humanism. This interweaving of character-driven storytelling and documentary as capacity building is a characteristic of what Paige Sarlin calls the non-profit industrial complex. As Sarlin and other scholars like Sujata Fernandez have argued, since the 1990s, storytelling has become key to the social and political work of NGOs. During this period, large-scale human rights events propagated the idea of the individual story as central to the formation of publics and audiences. In doing so, storytelling was abstracted from the broader goals of mass movement politics, instead, it becoming a highly reproducible vehicle for producing consensus, the common and the universal, through the endorsement of the personal. As nonprofits and NGOs moved increasingly into nonfiction funding, they brought these ideas with them. It shouldn't then be surprising that Sundance's China program was underwritten by a grant from the Open Society Foundations, the OSF. This is the organization that, according to its own website description, was founded precisely to support justice, democratic governance, and human rights work around the world. This funding came with certain expectations. According to Perez, the OSF stipulated all the workshops include a public element, suggesting the funders' underlying commitment to the public sphere as a concept. Arguably, the logic of humanitarian intervention was therefore integrated into the CNEX Sundance program from its inception. Rather than seeing the industrial, commercial, and humanitarian facets of these training workshops as contradictory, it's perhaps better then to view them as complementary. Both Sundance and C Nex clearly understood the aim of these specific events as a production of independent filmmakers for the global and particularly the Anglophone, film and TV industries. Sundance and the OSF seem also to have seen the program as a way of producing filmmakers as civil society agents. Individuals who could use filmmaking to capacity build at a local level while also using nonfiction as a form of consciousness raising for a global public. Storytelling, understood as a universal commodity to which all individuals have rights, draws these discourses together, becoming the perfect vehicle through which the rights-bearing individual can both find their creative voice and build their public. This distinguishes these events from other China-based not-for-profit video production workshops, which don't seem to have brought these ideas together in a single package in quite the same way. But what might this actually imply for the films produced through the Sundark Cinex collaboration? If the workshops incorporated not just film industry but also NGO logics into their training, how might we trace the influence of the latter on the screen world of the documentaries that passed through them? And this is where I want to shift to think about a specific example: Plastic China. This documentary was Juan Perez flag to me as having passed through the CNEX Sundance workshops. The second film by Wang Zhou Liang, after Beijing Besieged by Waste, Plastic China focuses on the foreign waste processing business in the PRC. It's proven a hit internationally, being picked up by most of the major Western streaming platforms. You can watch it on Amazon, Google, and iTunes, for example. And it was selected for several major international film festivals, including Sundance and Idfer in Amsterdam, where it won the Jury Award for first appearance. Domestically, the official response was more conflicted. According to the film scholar Jin Lil, while a 26-minute media-friendly version exposing the global trash business received Chinese television coverage, the full-length film was banned as soon as it was released at the end of 2016. Furthermore, a video link of Wang's Ishii Talk on Environmental Issues, that's the kind of Chinese equivalent of a TED talk, was scrubbed from the internet and social media after going viral in January 2017. Wang's film is set in Shandong in northeast China, in a small town where thousands of households function as small factories processing imported foreign plastic waste. It focuses on one of these businesses, owned and managed by Kun, a former farmer and a local. Kun employs a family of rural migrants from Sichuan in southwest China to work for him processing plastic. It's the daughter of this family, 11-year-old IJ, who's Plastic China's other primary protagonist. One strand of the film follows Kun and his family as he works to save enough money to buy a car. The second follows IJ as she struggles with homesickness and the desire to attend school. This desire is highlighted through comparison with Kun's son, Chi Chi, who's allowed to start primary school. And in contrast, IJ's father wants her to remain at home working. The film therefore mediates the social and environmental consequences of the plastic recycling business through a character-driven narrative that increasingly focuses on two small children, their distinct personal trajectories, and the role that education plays in gendered social immobility. As a result, Plastic China has to constantly negotiate attention between its ability to conduct systemic structural analysis and its desire to focus on the individual story. To give you some sense of how this plays out, I want to play two short clips. The first is the immediate post-title sequence from the beginning of the film. The second occurs right before the end of the film, and in it we see Kun, his wife, and his son Chi Chi on a family visit to Beijing before immediately segueing into a sequence with Yi Zie back in Shandong. So this is the first clip, and it's only a couple of minutes long. Arrives in the port of Qingdao and is then transported across Shandong to Kun's business. Combined with the intertitle, it explicitly positions a film story as a product of transnational waste logistics and visualizes those logistics for us at different scales through different modes of transport, say the tanker, the lorry, the bike. But analysis of that system quite quickly takes a backseat to a focus on EJ and her family and Kun and his. The film's emphasis is more on their individual desires and intrafamilial relationships than on their comparative positions within the global labour market. This latter issue can sometimes be inferred, for example, from the images of foreign brown packaging that are identifiable in the waste filtered by EJ, but it isn't discussed directly. Similarly, while the intertwined story of the two families hints at issues of class, after all, EJ's father literally works for Quim, explicit exploration of this conflict's avoided, softening the social violence involved. As a result, by the end of the film, the politicals really become personalized in a manner distinct from the structural critique that launches the documentary. Where we started with a film supposedly about the inequalities of the global recycling industry, we finish with one that's focused more on a little girl who simply wants, indeed has the right, to get an education. This narrowing of narrative focus is reinforced formally. As Jin Leo points out, initially the film makes careful use of mise en to highlight the pervasiveness of rubbish in the lives of its subjects. In particular, the use of angled shots creates an imbalance between the children and their environment, dwarfing the latter with the refuse of, sorry, dwarfing the former with the refuse of the latter. But as the film progresses, it foregrounds more mainstream commercial editing and cinematographic techniques. Aside from the types of conversational address to camera that we might associate with TV documentary, these include using close-ups to draw our attention to individual characters and using music to evoke a particular emotional mood or response to a scene. And a good example here occurs about an hour into the film where both families attend a car show. And again, this is just a couple of minutes long. So that final unmoving medium close-up of EJ that we get at the end of the kind of the moment in the car show is clearly intended to draw our attention to her. It suggests her sense of displacement in this environment, manifested in part through her physical movement, so the constant looking around from side to side. But I think it's also intended to encourage the viewer to empathize with her, and this is reinforced by the music. The composer of the film Soundtrack, Tyler Strickland, says one of its primary aims was to highlight EJ's perspective and the strong mix of emotions that stem from her curious awareness of the extent of how bad those living conditions are, her dreams for the future, and her sadness of being away from home. Though this knowledge doesn't exclude a more critical reading, it's clear that Plastic China's formal choices are intended to draw us into the personal stories playing out on screen, rather than direct our attention to the complex structural dynamics that underpin them. I'd argue that these formal characteristics, so the prioritization of the personal story over structural analysis, an emphasis on our affective and empathetic response to that story, and the minimization of diegetic conflict, all reflect the humanitarian industrial logic that I've identified in the C Next Sundance workshops. Paige Sarlin suggests that as documentary storytelling shifted from a social movement to an NGO practice, it came to promote an idea of politics outside the political. It began to focus on the individual rather than the structural, on particular people rather than the social, political, and economic systems within which they're embedded. As a result, Salin argues that documentary storytelling has become a practice through which contradictions are harmonized, inequality and social justice are personalized, and social reconciliation is affected. The telescoping of Plastic China's vision such that structural issues fall away in favour of a personal story reflects this dynamic. So too does the decision to focus the film on the plight of the child, a kind of classic trope of the humanitarian imagination, and one that's often assumed to elide tensions through the universal ethical response that children are believed to elicit in the viewer. And I think we can identify this impulse to harmonisation in the emotive response that Tyler Strickland implies is central to the working of the film. Rather than confront the systemic economic inequality keeping EJ trapped in place, literally and socially, we're instead encouraged to sublimate our discomfort by empathizing with or feeling sorry for the story's victims. Character-driven storytelling in the contemporary humanitarian documentary not only gives voice to particular people, it establishes a framework for interpreting or responding to their stories. This framework doesn't emphasize mass mobilization or class struggle. Instead, it accentuates catharsis and compromise. Ultimately, as Sujata Fernandez points out, it links nonfiction storytelling to discourses of participation, empowerment, and social capital, enabling such stories to be more easily recuperated by the existing political and economic system. So that reading of Plastic China that I've just given departs from much of the literature that's been written on the documentary to date. This literature tends to see the film as less conservative than I do, especially in relation to other domestic representations of migrant workers. And I think that might be one reason why the state found it reasonably sensitive when it first came out. But if we think of Plastic China as a film consciously moulded to circulate outside the borders of the PLC, we can locate it within a genealogy of humanitarian media that adds another layer to our interpretation while also raising further questions. And it's to these questions that I want to turn in the final part of the talk. Specifically, how does an overseas audience react to a film like this? Does this response correlate with the argument advanced by Salin and Fernandez that such stories reinforce rather than challenge global systems of inequality? And why might this be significant for our understanding of China in the world? So, as I mentioned earlier, Plastic China featured in a UK film tour I helped to organise in November 2019. Entitled Earth in Crisis, it toured four independent Chinese documentaries, all loosely addressing environmental themes, to seven screening locations in six British cities. All the films we shared were distributed by CNEX, who helped us to secure the screening rights. In addition, three filmmakers also toured the different cities, engaging in QA sessions on their films. After the screenings, we asked students to fill out forms where they could outline their responses to the film they just seen. These forms were very simple and they mostly asked direct questions intended to get a basic kind of attendance and impact statistics for the project funder. But at the end, audience members were given space for an open-ended response in which they were asked, what words would you use to describe this documentary and your experience of watching it? And this is where the material actually got interesting. That's a kind of visualization of some of the responses that we got. And these responses demonstrated certain patterns. Overall, the word most closely associated with all the films was moving. Moving was used over twice the number of times of words more closely connected to documentaries' traditional epistophilical pedagogical functions, so words like information or informative. And that's before we even start considering responses that also use terms similar to moving, like touching or emotional. Shock was also a response by many viewers. So clearly, kind of members of the audience had a very strong, affective reaction to watching the films. That pattern was actually replicated in interesting ways if we look at the responses specific to the plastic china screenings. Ten viewers talked of their shock at seeing the film, far more in relation to that than any of the other films that were screened. Being moved or touched also came up seven times, while two viewers described feeling overwhelmed by the documentary. Even more interesting, though, is what viewers attached these emotions to and where they saw them leading. Almost all said they were unaware of the details of the plastic waste recycling business and that this film brought the issue to their attention. However, few framed this as a structural problem. While some described their guilt as consumers, only one respondent mentioned capitalism as directly responsible for the conditions in the documentary, while one other highlighted the class elements of the film as being of interest over and above its environmental and basic human story. Instead, it was precisely this basic human story that engaged many of the viewers. As Christine pointed out earlier, those comments are perhaps a little small, but what I'm going to do is actually talk through some of them. Okay. Plastic China's use of a character-driven narrative focused on children generated many of these emotional responses because I think it was precisely this basic human story that engaged a lot of the viewers. Some of those responses were quite general. For example, it may be very sad for the individuals, or I had no idea about the suffering of individuals as they process plastics. Others were more specific to particular sequences or images. So one viewer commented, it was very moving and shocking to see the characters literally living in the plastic and still preserve humanity and cultivate hope for the future. Another said, it was shocking to see babies climbing the rubbish tips. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, EJS schooling came up as an issue, sometimes distinct from, sometimes tied up with, environmental questions. As one viewer said, in the West, we take for granted free access to school, good healthcare, and freedom from child labour. These families considered education to be a privilege to escape poverty, a dream almost. Another, more directly, asked, how do we ensure that all children are educated to at least 15 years of age? These responses chime with the claims I outlined earlier regarding the impact of character-driven documentary forms on documentaries and their reception. These arguments propose this format highlights the personal or individual at the expense of the structural. They also suggest that the format subsumes conflict, particularly class-based conflict, into a more emotive, cathartic reception, one that seeks points of commonality over difference. In the reactions just detailed, we can see a clear focus on individual characters, especially children, as the site of an emotional response to the film. We can also identify a consequent gradual framing of certain responses around the right of the child as a universal subject to education. These responses are sometimes intertwined with questions of environmental degradation and poverty, but less so with analyses of the systems that result in these injustices. This is all the more apparent when we isolate those few responses that discussed what steps the viewers felt they should do next. One of the audience members who admitted to feeling overwhelmed by the film asked rhetorically, I wondered how, as an individual, I could help. Another said that after seeing the movie, I started thinking of ways to concretely help the protagonist and her family. Finally, one stated that the documentary has enlightened me. Firstly, to try to make an effort to use less plastic. And secondly, to write to my MP to raise the issue and try to address it. How to translate awareness into action has long been a conundrum of activist or committed documentary filmmaking. Affect and sensation have played their part here, perhaps most famously in Jane M. Gaines' concept of political mimesis. Gaines argues that committed documentary can be understood as a body genre, a type of film which produces in the viewer's body an involuntary sensation of what they see and hear on the screen. Committed documentaries thus engage in political mimicry, seeking to shock or stimulate their viewers into action through their use of sound and image. In her essay, Gaines is discussing explicitly radical cinema that looks to incite collective political struggle. But what's striking about those responses to plastic china is that they too mimic the logic of the film's character-driven storytelling, albeit with rather different consequences. Clearly, the film generated a powerful emotional charge. It seems to have affectively implicated at least some British viewers, producing in them a sense of their own complicity as consumers. This then translated into a concern for the impact of used plastic recycling on those they saw on screen. But in rendering the scale of this problem for a story that centers around children as rights-bearing individuals, Plastic China apparently also generated a politically mimetic response of a similar kind. In asking what should happen next, respondents' queries rarely raise about the question of what they as individuals should be doing to address the problems captured in the documentary, right down to limiting personal plastic use. Where an interest in affecting structural change did manifest, as in that final response I quoted, it was through the exercise of individual democratic rights within the Westminster system, namely writing to one's MP. These reactions ultimately suggest a desire for change directed inwards to the personal, rather than outwards to broader society, and into actions that legitimate representative democratic institutions rather than exploring the problem of global plastic dumping and how it emerged under these institutions' very watch in the first place. These viewers' responses largely didn't translate into thinking about the possibilities of collective action, nor did they lead to explicit critiques of global capitalism, which is, after all, the system that sustains both plastic consumption and the uneven spatial division of its disposal. Instead, their reaction suggests the empathetic recuperation of audience members into the existing liberal political capitalist order through discourses of individual participation. As an example of documentary humanitarian intervention, Plastic China attempts to build a global public for environmental change by wrapping character-driven storytelling around the figure of the child in need. The resulting effective response, however, serves to reinforce key elements of the system that produced this environmental crisis in the first place, short-circuiting the impact of the documentary before it's really begun. In the introduction to their book, Global China as Method, Ivan Franceschini and Nicolas Lubert argue that there are three rhetorical frameworks used to place China outside the existing global order. One's exceptionalism, the argument that China is inherently and essentially different from the West, associated by the authors with right-wing commentary. Another's whataboutism, a rhetorical trick often practiced by certain kinds of leftist commentators faced with criticism of Chinese policies. Finally, we have the Meutic approach, favored by liberal commentators. Here, China's perceived as fundamentally different, an authoritarian polity that needs to be coaxed more fully into the institutionalized international order. Ultimately, the aim is for the PRC to become a normal, liberal, democratic country. All three approaches cover a full range of political positions, but what they share is an underlying assumption of China's inherent separation and difference and its status as an external agent of change. I'd argue that Plastic China presents us with a variation on the meutic approach. The film performs a dual move. On the one hand, China is represented as a space outside the global liberal order. It's somewhere that doesn't respect the rights of all children to an education, for example, and which forces some of them into menial labor at an acceptably unearly age. On the other hand, the film's Chinese subjects are represented as like the liberal Western viewer. They're individuals striving for similar goals, even if they can't fulfil these over the course of the documentary's story. The intense, affective response generated in many viewers by the latter in turn directs those viewers to try and bring these subjects into that order, in the process of validating the values, practices, and even subjectivities of liberal politics. This doesn't prevent criticisms that seek to situate the documentary's subject matter as a product of and internal to the existing global order, but I'd argue that it does seem to limit their efficacy. Identifying structures of feeling is notoriously hard. Nonetheless, I term this particular combination of sentiment and subject matter worrying about China. I've misappropriated this formulation from Gloria Davies' book of the same name. Davies uses the phrase in a precise manner. For her, it captures the desire in post-1980s Chinese intellectual discourse to pinpoint and seek solutions for problems that impede China's perfection, both as a nation and as a civilization. She names this dynamic patriotic worrying, Yao Huan, which serves to localize domestic reception of critical thought from overseas. In plastic China, this dynamic's inverted. China's also an object of worry, but for humanitarian rather than patriotic reasons, and primarily for foreign rather than local views. The resulting structure of feeling is a marker of concerns about the country's perceived difference from the global liberal order, but also a way to affect its successful incorporation into that same system. Chinese independent documentary may be gained global, but at what cost? So briefly to conclude. First, to trace how a subset of contemporary Chinese independent documentary reaches an international audience while unpacking certain assumptions implicit both in the structure of these films and in the spaces that shape their production. As I hope I've demonstrated, the idea of story as a form both commercial and humanitarian is key here. It's central to how the C Next Sundance workshops believed that independent Chinese documentary could connect with Anglophone viewers overseas. Embedded in this understanding of story were propositions about or presuppositions about its universal subject that manifest in the style and content of these documentaries, and thus in ways that address the viewer. As a result, my second aim has been to unpack that address and its cultural politics. My argument is, in effect, that the response to plastic china manifests, for some people at any rate, as a type of liberal political mimesis. Here, affect and emotion are clearly important, both as enablers and as disablers of a particular critical reaction. This suggests how we might understand the local screening space as a media environment, one that's also shaped by and connected to a space of training and production that's both geographically and temporally distant to the moment of exhibition. But it also illuminates some of the preconditions to independent Chinese documentary going label and the compromises that filmmakers may be expected to make along the way. And I'll leave it there. Thank you guys for listening.