Exiled, Nomadic, or Diasporic Filmmaking? Mobility of Imagined Audience in the Production of Border-Crossing Cinema in Asia.

This paper looks for the conditions of migrant filmmakers' production practices determining the cinematic representation of border-crossing experience. When they cross borders, filmmakers face the different mode of production in which production convention, style, institutional and cultural contexts are based on different conceptions of the audience - imagined audience. The complexity and ambiguity of the imagined audience in film production cause tension between producers and migrant filmmakers. The tension may be negotiated or forces filmmakers to perform a delicate balancing act between their previous understanding of the audience and newly defined one. Mobility of filmmakers in border-crossing summons their imagined audience to be the newly-imagined one floating in mobility, creating a complex interplay between multiple contextualities at work with the industry, text, and audience of border-crossing cinema production.

Migrant filmmakers can be theorized based on the notion of mobility, not only in geographical border-crossing but also in different conceptions of their home: whether filmmakers have migrated voluntary or being forced by political or economic reason. In other words, it is the question of how important for filmmakers to return to home in the future. The relationship of filmmakers' 'mobility' to 'home' determines whether they do filmmaking in exile, nomadism, or diaspora, and further to shape their production either independent filmmaking or mainstream one based on different imagined audience by the industry. By putting the notion of mobility at the center in the relationships with home and the imagined audience, this paper draws more attention to the politics of identity and subjectivity those migrant filmmakers struggle with, while overcoming the broad and descriptive use of 'transnationality' and 'translocality' simply based on geographical borderlines.

In this context, this study investigates how the imagined audience in film production set the limits and possibilities in the nature of production practices and conditions differently for exiled, nomadic, and/or diasporic filmmakers and mediate their border-crossing experience and identity via the representational forms and style. The migrant filmmakers are selected based on their 'mobility' for interviews: exiled independent filmmaker, nomadic independent filmmaker, diasporic mainstream filmmaker, and those who are back and forth between independent and mainstream. In addition, this research uses discourse analysis, archival research, and textual analysis of selected films.