Published by Primary Information. Foreword by Jean Ma.
This collection of writings by artist and filmmaker Tiffany Sia (born 1988) gathers six essays that offer a framework for fugitive cinema. Written in the wake of the 2019–20 Hong Kong Protests ignited by the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement, Sia’s writings survey the rise of a new documentary vernacular being produced by a wave of emerging filmmakers breaking from the nostalgia of Hong Kong’s cinematic golden age. As a practitioner and thinker, Sia has been at the forefront of a nascent generation of artists working to trace social unrest and political crackdowns. Drawing from personal experience and historical study, her writings offer urgent reflections on a cultural landscape changed by censorship and surveillance. An essential counterpart to her oeuvre, this volume is a critical intervention into global film studies, the politics of film/photographic practices and experimental approaches to documentary. Film stills from filmmakers Chan Tze-woon and the anonymous collective Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers, photographs by artist An-My Lę and images from Sia’s short film The Sojourn (2023) are interspersed between each essay, inviting the reader to consider a cinema by other means.
