For non-Columbia affiliates, registration is required to access the Morningside campus. After registering you will receive an email with a QR code that must be presented along with a government-issued ID (your name must match exactly the name registered for the event) at either the 116th Street & Broadway or 116th Street & Amsterdam gates for entry. Please register using a unique email address (one email address per registrant) by May 2 at 4:00 pm for campus access.
Names will be submitted for QR codes 1-2 days prior to the event. Registrants will receive an email from CU Guest Access with the QR code before or on the day of the event.
Speaker: Shayan Momin, New York University, Ph.D. (Sociocultural Anthropology); Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University-Shanghai
Moderator: Nicholas Bartlett, Assistant Professor of Contemporary Chinese Culture and Society, AMEC/EALAC, Barnard College
Hengdian World Studios is China’s largest film studio, a major center for producing historical dramas that attract thousands of rural migrant workers to work for unsteady wages as background actors. But increased political censorship of historical dramas, the popularity of digital video platforms, and the low wages of background acting encourages many Hengdian migrants to earn money in monetized live video streams that celebrate their broke and aspirational status as hengpiao, or Hengdian drifters. This ethnographic film introduces viewers to Hengdian’s cultural worlds by examining the motivations of several Hengdian drifters.
Produced in New York University’s Program in Culture and Media, Hengdian Dreaming has screened at the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Ethnographic Film Festival (London), Ethnofest (Athens), and has been used in courses at NYU, Duke University, National Taiwan University, and the University of Hong Kong. The film was featured in the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s Visual and New Media Review and received an honorable mention for the Society for East Asian Anthropology's 2022 David Plath Media Award.
Hengdian Dreaming (2021, 56 min.) is in Mandarin with English subtitles.
This event is hosted by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and co-sponsored by the Film & Media Studies of the School of the Arts, Columbia University.
Registration: To attend this event in-person, please register HERE.
