Independent documentaries have been recognised as a highly significant sector of contemporary Chinese cinema and media culture. Among these, the observational practice of direct cinema, while being undeniably a powerful method of examining the broad structures of, and massive changes in, contemporary Chinese society, runs the risk of being insensitive or even inaccurate when applied to the representation of those social realities characterised by alterity or otherness. This challenge is particularly obvious in projects that involve depictions of emotions, identities and subjectivities and especially those of traditionally underrepresented figures and groups, such as women, queer and ethnic minorities. Conversely, moving image works created by members from such communities present some of the most powerful critiques of mainstream assumptions and offer inspiring examples – in content as well as in form – that contest the boundary between filmmaker and filmed subject, observer and participant, documentary and fiction.

In the context of our discussion of independent cinema, personal filmmaking and personal documentary, minority productions not only enrich the growing alternative archive of underrepresented communities and identities, but also illustrate the theoretical strength of minority discourses to critically engage with social reality. For example, the experimental documentaries of the woman filmmaker Tang Danhong and queer filmmakers Shi Tou and Cui Zi'en offer some important insights in this light. Instead of maintaining a neutral, non-interfering process of representation, these filmmakers tend to mobilise an embodied camera and craft cinematic bodies as well as subjectivities that both play with, and criticise, the boundary between self and other. Through a provocatively engaged mode of moving image making, their works provide an insider's view of personal experiences and visibly register particular (such as homosexual) identities. Also, significantly, these works exemplify cinematic strategies of not only recording, but also imagining and producing subjectivities that are shown or argued to be in concrete and conscious relations to each other, hence performing, in the very form of an unconventional moving image culture, critical interventions as regards a plethora of theoretical as well as social issues, including history, memory, identity, gender, the sex industry and migrant labour.