Contemporary Sinophone Cinema: Australia-China Co-Productions

Abstract

Australian co-productions with China and other Asian countries such as Singapore typify a new film-making trend in the region. This chapter examines three key feature films from Australia that have been co-produced with China: The Children of the Silk Road (The Children of Huang Shi) (dir. Roger Spottiswoode, 2008); The Dragon Pearl (dir. Mario Andreacchio, 2011) and 33 Postcards (Mei Mei) (dir. Pauline Chan, 2011). All three films either use accented Mandarin or are set in China and its Australian diaspora, or both, and all three have Chinese casts and storylines. These films thus reflect the rapidly emerging Sinophone film periphery, in Australia, as an excentric mediascape of transnational Chineseness. With its Chinese-language origin communities, both established and new, Australia is quickly becoming a key node in the Sinophone world. Unlike the dominant Chinese diasporas and their migrant mediascapes in the West, Australia’s Chinese communities and their media practices are marked by excentricism, an off-centredness that locates the specific place of the country in the Asia Pacific region, as South of the West (Gibson, 1992).