Representing rural migrants in films: an exploration of the subjectivities and agency of rural migrants in independant Chinese documentaries

One of the defining features of Chinese new documentaries is the relationship which the filmmakers build with the subjects they are filming thanks to their bottom-up perspectives. In this paper, I will discuss Lü Xinyu’s argument that new documentary filmmakers have allowed “the power of reality to inter into their films” and that this reality “thereby exceeds their subjective will as filmmakers” (Lü 2010: 28). More specifically, by looking at how rural migrant workers are represented in these films, I will argue that new documentaries provide a very valuable vantage point in order to engage with the rich and at once highly contradictory dimension of rural migrant workers’ identity and agency made of aspirations, hopes, but also frustration, and hardship.