Re-envisioning Chinese ethnic minority films as accented cinema

In this article, I employ Naficy’s expanded concept of accented cinema as an analytical framework to examine two films by Chinese ethnic minority filmmakers: Korean-Chinese Zhang Lü’s Grain in Ear (2005) and Pema Tseden’s Tharlo (2015). The focus is on how these films embody a sense of displacement, vulnerability and confinement through the spatial chronotopes of open, closed and third spaces. It argues that Pema Tseden’s Tharlo and Zhang Lü’s Grain in Ear share a central concern with the complexity of belonging by illuminating the multifarious experiences of non-belonging or uncomfortable belonging in various specific contexts. Pema Tseden’s work foregrounds the Tibetan experience of confinement and alienation in the face of modernity’s encroachment, whereas Zhang Lü’s film explores the diasporic condition and the marginalization experienced by Korean-Chinese people in China, offering nuanced understandings of displacement within their respective contexts.