Clara Law (Law Cheuk-yiu) has amassed a substantial body of work as a writer and/or director, with upward of twenty feature credits between 1985 and 2015. Starting with her early Hong Kong–based films addressing sexuality, The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus (Pan Jin Lian zhi qian shi jin sheng, 1989) and Temptation of a Monk (1993), Law embraced transnational cinema through invitations and awards from major international film festivals, as well as participating in Erotique (1994), a compilation film with multinational contributors. Her work insistently interrogates the interconnections among concepts of Asia, transcultural migrations, and filmmaking practice through narratives that exceed “Chineseness” both in terms of culture and ethnicity, and in terms of expectations for Asian women directors. Reconfigurations of sexual and cultural identity, and geopolitical correspondences and differentiations, consistently recur in her filmic narratives, as characters encounter new personal, cultural, racial and ethnic formations in the wake of geopolitical transmigrations.
Clara Law Cheuk-yiu's Transcultural Cinema
Kay Armatage is a professor emerita at the Cinema Studies Institute and the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. She is the author of many articles on Canadian women filmmakers, editor of Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women's Cinema (University of Toronto Press, 1999), and author of The Girl from God's Country: Nell Shipman and the Silent Cinema (University of Toronto Press, 2003).
Xiqing Qin is a research fellow and professor at the Institute of Film and TV Arts at the National Academy of Chinese Arts. She is the author of many articles on Chinese early cinema and women filmmakers, as well as the monographs European Cinema and Chinese Early Cinema, 1920–1930 (China Film Press, 2008) and Western Feminist Cinema: Theory, Criticism and Practice (China Film Press, 2008). She coauthored Chinese Film History (Higher Education Press, 1996) and translated Movie History: A Survey by Douglas Gomery and Clara Pafort-Overduin (China Film Press, 2016). She is a coeditor of the journal Film and TV Culture.
Kay Armatage, Xiqing Qin; Clara Law Cheuk-yiu's Transcultural Cinema. Feminist Media Histories 1 January 2019; 5 (1): 63–94. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2019.5.1.63
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