We are pleased to announce the tenth CIFA Screening and Research Seminar, titled ‘The Work of Return: Livelihoods, Land, and the Making of Home’. This event is also the opening screening for an independent feminist, research-led exhibition (please see the attached flyer for details), curated by Yujia Xu, a PhD candidate at the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University. Yujia Xu is a feminist geographer and tea practitioner, tracing how women’s labour, tea, ethnicity, and place are braided together through embodiment, care, and material relations.
We will screen Chen Xueli’s documentary The Village That Moved Back: An Audiovisual Log of Shangnan Village 搬回來的村子：上囡村影音日誌 (2018), a fieldwork-based anthropological documentary that follows eleven Bulang households in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, as they return from a government resettlement site to rebuild their original tea village without electricity or running water. Filmed as an audiovisual log of tea work, rituals, and everyday life, it traces how land sustains livelihood, relationships, and belonging across borders. Chen Xueli is a Yunnan-based filmmaker and Associate Research Fellow at Yunnan University.
The screening will take place from 1 pm to 3:30 pm (London time) the 3rd of February, followed by a post-screening conversation with the filmmaker. You are encouraged to join us in person at the Chinese Independent Film Archive (Old Library Building 2.23).
Topics for discussion include (but are not limited to):
- Senses, memory, and identity: how taste can evoke lived experiences of “home,” place, and ethnicity
- Gendered and generational labour landscapes: how work, care, and authority are distributed, and made to seem “natural” in everyday life
- Border-crossing everydayness: how language, faith, and migration experiences shape cross-border lifeworlds
- Film as fieldwork and method: how the rhythm of an audiovisual diary, the camera’s distance, and editing choices construct knowledge and visibility
- Place change in a time slice: what a film shot a decade ago can reveal about continuity and rupture in the Yunnan tea mountains
- From film to exhibition: hierarchies of value and visibility, how tea’s “beauty” is sustained by obscured labour and backgrounded bodies
