Accenting Chinese cinema in Sinophone East Asia: Zhang Lü’s Yanagawa (2021) and transborder filmmaking

This article examines Zhang Lü’s Yanagawa, the first film by the Korean-Chinese director to receive theatrical release in mainland China, as a critical intervention into prevailing frameworks of transnational Chinese cinema. The film has often been treated as evidence of Zhang’s return to national cinema after a long career shaped by South Korea, border-crossing production, and festival circulation. Against this narrative of return, the article argues that Yanagawa continues Zhang’s transborder aesthetics by turning transnationality inward, toward the linguistic, regional, and affective hierarchies that organize Chinese-speaking worlds. Building on debates in critical transnationalism, Sinophone studies, and accented cinema, I propose ‘accenting’ as a method for reading Zhang’s recent work: not simply as the mark of an exilic or diasporic author, but as a situated cinematic practice that makes dissonance, misalignment, and partial belonging perceptible. Through close analysis of Yanagawa’s treatment of Putonghua, Beijing speech, silence, translation, reflected imagery, and translocal space, the article shows how the film unsettles the opposition between national return and transnational mobility. Yanagawa is not merely a film about accent; it is a film that works as accent, registering the uneven politics of intelligibility within Sinophone East Asia.