Abstract
British Chinese films have struggled to find a significant presence in the writings of British cinema history, even within debates on minority cinemas, such as Black British or British Asian cinema, which have since the 1980s established a canon of margins of sorts. This chapter argues for an inclusive historiography that places British Chinese filmmaking within these wider debates, through the analysis of films such as Ping Pong (1986), Soursweet (1988), Peggy Su (1997), and Cut Sleeve Boys (2006), which not only intersect with issues of representation and various film funding initiatives that have encouraged new voices but also highlight questions of distribution and exhibition for small films in the construction of national cinemas.
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Notes
- 1.
Burt Kwuok is best known for his role as Cato, Inspector Clouseau’s manservant in the Pink Panther films, but he has also appeared in three Bond films, Goldfinger (1964), the spoof Casino Royale (1967), and You Only Live Twice (1967), as well as in the long-running TV series Last of the Summer Wine (BBC 1973–2010) from 2002 to 2010. More recently, he was the voice actor for the dragon Shen in the CBBC series Spirit Warriors (2010). Kwuok died in 2016 at the age of eighty-five.
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Chan, F., Willis, A. (2018). British Chinese Cinema and the Struggle for Recognition, Even on the Margins. In: Thorpe, A., Yeh, D. (eds) Contesting British Chinese Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71159-1_9
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