British Born Chinese

The film is about Daniel and Kevin, two school boys born to Chinese migrants and living in Manchester. It engages their everyday struggles of reconciling their Britishness with Chineseness through their experiences at school, as volunteers at a community centre, and at home. The film uses an ethical approach driven by dialogue and close involvement with the film’s subjects to understand the vulnerabilities through which the boys navigate their place in the British society. It not only uncovers new dimensions to understanding the ways the subjects experience their lifeworlds, but also seeks to reduce the epistemic violence of dominant visual forms of representation.

Andy Lawrence

Andy is Lecturer in Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester’s Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology and he is currently visiting fellow at Bern University in Switzerland. His films are available by worldwide distribution and a selection of this work can be seen on his production company website, AllRitesReversed. He has made films about childbirth, death, adolescence, old age, adventure and identity in the U.K. and India. He has worked for TV in the U.K., U.S.A. and the Netherlands, working on a wide variety of subjects.

Elena Barabantseva

Dr Elena Barabantseva is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Manchester (UK). Her research focuses on the questions of Chinese national identity, borders, migration, ethnic politics and Chinese diaspora. My book “”Overseas Chinese, Ethnic Minorities, and Nationalism: De-Centering China”” (Routledge, 2011) analyses the role of ethnic minorities and overseas Chinese in understanding the contested nature of the Chinese nation. Her current research extends the focus on the borders of Chinese identity by examining marriage migration issues along China’ borders and experimenting with audio-visual research methods.