Life in-between Screens: “The World, Two Meters Away”

This conversation, originally conducted in Chinese, explores the role of films, movie theaters, screens, streaming platforms, and documentary filmmaking in China during the initial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Zhang Zhen and Jiang Jiehong—professors at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and Birmingham City University, UK, respectively—discuss the human rights movement prompted by state-sanctioned racist violence, feminist interventions in filmmaking practices, documentation of the pandemic in China, and tensions between state discourse and minjian (unofficial, unaffiliated, grassroots, and among-the-people) narratives