Indigenous Resilience in Sunflower-Era Taiwan Cinema

Join us on Thursday, Oct. 8, 2026, at 1:30 p.m. for the first lecture in the Taiwan Studies Lecture Series at ASU, featuring Brian Bernards, associate professor of East Asian languages and cultures at the University of Southern California.

Lunch will be provided for registered attendees. Please register in advance, and we hope to see you there!

This lecture is hosted by the Asia Center at ASU, and made possible through the generous support of the Education Division at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles (TECOLA). 

Title:

“Indigenous Resilience in Sunflower-Era Taiwan Cinema: Leveraging Pangcah Knowledge, Skill, and Creativity in KANO (2014) and Panay (2015)”

Abstract: 

KANO (dir. Umin Boya, 2014) and Panay (dir. Cheng Yu-chieh and Lekal Sumi, 2015) are two Indigenous-themed and collaboratively directed Taiwanese films released in the 2010s that navigate and resist minoritized assimilation into Han settler-dominant expressions of Taiwanese multicultural solidarity amidst the anti-KMT political opposition of the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement protests. Even as their Pangcah co-directors negotiate settler-indigenous partnerships within Han Taiwanese-dominated media structures and audience expectations, navigating cross-cultural and translingual hybridity through community relations marked by departures and loss, the films demonstrate how Indigenous co-creators can leverage different forms of prized knowledge, skill, and creativity (athletic, agricultural, musical, storytelling, and multilinguistic) to amplify issues of name rectification, community revitalization, and self-determination within Sunflower Movement discourses, thereby refining and remixing strategies of Indigenous presence and resilience outlined by Indigenous Studies scholars like Gerald Vizenor (2008) and Chadwick Allen (2010).

Presenter Bio:

Brian Bernards is associate professor of East Asian languages and cultures and comparative literature at the University of Southern California, specializing in Sinophone and Southeast Asian literature and cinema, inter-Asia cultural studies, and translingual postcolonial studies. He is author of "Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature" (U of Washington Press, 2015 / NUS Press, 2016) and a co-editor of "Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader" (Columbia U Press, 2013). His articles have appeared in journals such as Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, positions: Asia critique, Asian Cinema, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Postcolonial Studies, and Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature.