What is it about?
Seediq Bale, one of the most expensive and most successful inter-Asian co-productions in Taiwanese film history, received attention locally and internationally for its cinematic quality and theme. During the film’s production, Taiwanese, Japanese, South Korean, and ethnically Korean Chinese crewmembers worked together. How did these film workers experience precarity in the highly international and cross-border production of Seediq Bale? Based on the author’s onsite participant observation and interviews with film workers between 2009 and 2011, the current study explains the ways in which crewmembers experience precarity—such as insecurity in border-crossing and networking—in the labor process of a Taiwan-based inter-Asian film production. The article explores the international dimensions of precarious labor, or “internationalized precarity,” in the film’s production, evidenced by the heavily freelance- and network- based work and by how film workers cope.
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Why is it important?
This is based on the author's field research (participant observation and interviews).
Perspectives
This research contributes to media production studies vis-à-vis labor studies by demonstrating how precarity is intensified and negotiated in an internationalized, precarious production site in Asia. - Media production studies increasingly focus on precarious labor, but there is a relative absence of giving attention to an international dimension of the labor process in the production. - This case study uses ethnography of a Taiwan-based inter-Asian film production to show how crewmembers experience precarity in the labor process. - Internationalized precarity in the film’s production is evidenced by the heavily freelance- and network-based work and by how film workers cope.
Dr Claire Seungeun Lee
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Experiencing “Internationalized precarity” in inter-Asian film production: A case study of Seediq Bale, Poetics, September 2017, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.poetic.2017.08.003.
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