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Urban Docs Asia: Identities, Memories, and Struggles in Asian Cities
Documentary film festival, 7-10 December 2010
Several of the world’s mega cities are today found in Asia where rapid urbanization is changing the social and economic landscape. Many Asian cities are economic and cultural powerhouses where domestic and global capital is fundamentally changing the urban form and way of life. These profound changes affect millions of people in myriads of different ways. For some people urbanization and city re-developments have meant evictions and a profound sense of dislocation, loss of memory, homes and land, and livelihood, whereas for others the cities offer new exciting spaces for creativity and wellbeing and an escape from rural life and poverty.
Urban life can both constrain and empower people, and thereby shape people’s lives and experiences of the city in strikingly different ways. Cities furthermore contain within themselves different urban spaces, some exclusive and others more inclusive and empowering. Urban life therefore gives rise to different lived spatial practices and memories. These memories are both of a private and collective character as cities are sites for political power and commemoration and manifestations of cultural and economic capital. Memories and a sense of urban space also depend on people’s socio-economic and political status and are often challenged and contested. Who owns the city and who has a say in urban planning? What voice do migrants, the homeless, youth and the elderly have in modern Asian cities?
Cities also give rise to myths and imagined communities and are consumed and celebrated through media and art. How do local residents and visitors imagine and experience in a city such as Tokyo? What does it mean to be a Singaporean or a Beijing citizen today? How are people’s memories and identities challenged and re-defined as cities undergo rapid and dramatic changes under processes of gentrification and globalization? How are neighbourhoods changed, destroyed, and re-invented in modern Asian cities? It goes without saying that people’s memories, experiences and struggles are intimately shaped by the specific city and time in which they live, but we also see similar processes and developments at play in many Asian cities and these furthermore bears some similarity to earlier and current developments in cities in the West.
Cities have long been explored and celebrated in art, including literature and film. Documentary films offer a particular fascinating way to capture the multifaceted forms of urban life. The films in this festival explore many of the fascinating but also problematic aspects and challenges of urban life in Asia. They document the memories and experiences of different individuals and groups of people in the process offering diverse ways to understand and sense rapid urban changes through the eyes and lives of different individuals. We will thus get glimpses of city life from the perspective of individuals from different social, economic, and ethnic groups in society, and from both young and old, men and women. The films will take us to big and cosmopolitan Asian cities such as Singapore, Tokyo, and Mumbai, to capitals such as Tokyo and Beijing. It will also take us to neighbourhoods within cities such as Meishi Street in Beijing and Miyamoto-cho in Tokyo.
The films chosen in this film festival range from documentaries by independent documentary filmmakers and artists, to activists, scholars and ordinary citizens, who use filmmaking to document and discuss contemporary urban life. Their views and visions certainly cannot reflect and do justice to all aspects of urban life in Asia. Many voices are left unrepresented and unexplored and there is a rich field waiting for future documentary filmmakers.
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Publisher: Centrum för öst- och sydöstasienstudier
Last modified 15 Nov 2010
