'Southeast Asian Cinemas Research Network' (SEACRN): Promoting Dialogue Across Critical and Creative Practice'.

While the large scale, established film industries of East and South Asia have garnered much attention in recent years, relatively few scholars have tackled the question of cinema and regionality in SE Asian contexts. This paucity is due partly to the reluctance to consider SE Asia as a legitimate regional formation: historically an artifact of Western, Cold War imaginings, the idea of "Southeast Asia" has been seen as an imposition of imperial power, external to the region and removed from local realities. However, at the same time, nation-states have harnessed this regionality towards political, economic, and cultural ends, promoting pan-Asian affiliations alongside local specificity as a means of promoting diplomacy, tourism, and the arts (for example, through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations). The Southeast Asian Cinemas Research Network seeks to investigate and understand better the nature and complexity of this cultural flow both within Asia and across the globe by bringing academics and practitioners into dialogue. Recent years have seen a growth of independent cinema across SE Asia, with growing inter-regional and international film circulation supported by new production and distribution companies (e.g. Kick the Machine and Mosquito Films Distribution), leading to increased visibility at international film festivals. Yet this occurs against a backdrop of increasing political instability, divisions amongst social classes and between ethnicities, and increasing levels of media censorship. Investigating these issues through the theme of 'Space, Time and the Visceral', this new Southeast Asia-UK-USA network will examine the effects (on both the industry and the film texts themselves) of postcolonial nationalism and censorship on the one hand, and globalisation and transnational flows on the other. These themes will be addressed at an international conference at the University of Nottingham, Malaysia and at workshops and symposia at the University of Stirling, the Hanoi Center for the Moving Image (DocLab), at the University of California and the Glasgow Short Film Festival. In a context where constraints over freedom of speech often mean that academics, students and filmmakers working within the region are severely restricted over what can be discussed publicly, SEACRN will play an important role in ensuring that these discussions have an international platform and audience, bringing an overall coherence to a more disparate set of individual research projects. In order to do this, the network will work with partners within the Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas and will use the planned conference in Kuala Lumpur as a launch pad to begin a new, truly international research project that will bring together academics, filmmakers and students from the UK, Asia and North America to discuss these problems, and develop new areas of research that will be strategically important in the study of Southeast Asian Cinemas. In doing so, it will strengthen existing links and build new and lasting partnerships that reflect the international reach of the research in a way that existing networks based in the region (such as ASEAC) have not been in a position to achieve for economic, structural and institutional reasons. The network also seeks to further knowledge within the discipline of film studies by collaborating with individuals from other disciplines. For example, Abidin Kusno (Chair of Asian Urbanism and Culture, University of British Columbia) will be invited to be the keynote speaker for the conference in Malaysia at the beginning of the project, and sound ethnographer and Lecturer in Anthropology, Ernst Karel (Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab) will be invited to take part in a workshop at Hanoi DocLab. By incorporating perspectives from urban studies and anthropology, these discussions will help to push disciplinary boundaries that will help indentify new areas for research prioritisation.

Engaging key stakeholders, the Macrobert, Edinburgh Film house, Glasgow Short Film Festival, Hanoi DocLab and the LA Asia Pacific Film Festival, and maximizing opportunities for knowledge exchange and public engagement through these partnerships, we believe that our programme of research will have far reaching cultural, social and economic impact in the following ways:
1. Filmmakers and academic experts in the field will add value for non-specialist audiences in the UK and the USA by providing a wider contextualisation of the political and industrial conditions in which the films were produced leading to cultural impact through greater knowledge and understanding amongst the general public.
2. Cultural impact will also be achieved through introductory talks by filmmakers and experts which will provide full and detailed analyses of the formal, aesthetic and narrative aspects of the films, leading to better understanding and increased appreciation of the cultural value of Southeast Asian Cinema. This may also have wider impact for the filmmakers and production companies in Southeast Asia (such as Mosquito Films Distribution, Kick the Machine and 10twentyeight), potentially increasing the international market for their films by raising the profile of Southeast Asian film more generally.
3. Social impact will be achieved through increased public awareness of the issues around censorship and cultural policy in non-Western contexts leading to greater international scrutiny of the actions of governments and policy makers within particular Southeast Asian nation-states. By raising awareness of these issues internationally, not only how censorship affects filmmakers, but also academics and students, the programme of research could lead to impact within individual countries with regards to policy change.
4. Economic impact will be achieved by improving the UK's economic competitiveness by raising the profile of arts research in Asia and America and strengthening international relations particularly with Southeast Asia and North America.
5. In the UK, local organisations - the Macrobert in Stirling, Edinburgh Film house and the festivals: Glasgow Short Film Festival and Southeast Asian Arts festival - could gain economic benefit from collaborating with the network because of the potential for increasing audiences at film screenings. Data on audience figures for these screenings will be collected and distributed to stakeholders to help with future planning.
6. Beneficiaries will include general audiences interested in global or Asian cinema, as well as specific local audiences with added investment in the representations and expressions of Southeast Asian life on screen, such as individuals who identify themselves as part of diasporic Southeast Asian communities in Scotland and in Los Angeles.