Director Guang Chunlan in Conversation Available to Purchase

Guang Chunlan is a Sibe ethnic born in 1940 in Ili, Xinjiang, China. She studied directing at Beijing Film Academy from 1961 to 1966. She started working at Nanjing Film Studio in 1976, after the Cultural Revolution, and permanently moved to Tianshan Studio in Xinjiang in 1983. By 2013 she had directed twenty-six fiction feature films, the majority of which center on ethnic groups in Xinjiang; some were made in several ethnic languages. Many of her films have been released and awarded in Arabic countries and India.

Zhou Xia is an associate researcher at China Film Art Research Center, specializing in Chinese film history, film narratology, and women's film. She has published numerous articles, including “A Study of the Genealogy of Female Characters in Chinese Early Cinema,” (in Chinese Early Cinema, China Broadcasting and Television Press, 2013); “The 1980s of Chinese Women Directors—Reexamining Women Directors' Work in the New Era” (in Chinese Cinema during the New Era 1978–1999, China Broadcasting and Television Press, 2017); and “Personality, Body and Being—The Three Decades of Chinese Women's Film 1978–2012” (in Study of Chinese Women's Cinema, China Film Press, 2013). Based on five hundred hours of oral histories from interviews she conducted, she has compiled The Film Trace of Shanghai (Minzu Press, 2011) and the two-volume Her Light and Shadow: Interviews with Women Directors (China Film Press, 2018). She coedited Film-Television Narratology (China Mass Communication University Press, 2007).

Yiwen Liu is a PhD student in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University.