From Africans in China
When I first put together a list of SinoAfrica documentaries in 2016, the field was still relatively small. There were already more than a dozen films about Chinese people in Africa and Africans in China, but the available visual archive reflected some fairly obvious inequalities in who got to look, narrate and represent. An overwhelming proportion of the documentaries circulating internationally had been produced by Western filmmakers and broadcasters. At the time, I suggested that a distinctly Eurocentric gaze still had a fairly firm grip on the emerging SinoAfrica documentary universe.
Ten years later, the landscape is considerably richer.
Western television and independent documentary remain part of the picture, but they now sit alongside films by African and Chinese directors, African–Chinese collaborations, independent documentaries, feature films, shorts and works that deliberately blur the boundary between fiction and documentary. The subjects have expanded too. Alongside infrastructure, mining and the perennial question of whether China is “colonising Africa,” we now find films about African traders in Guangzhou and Yiwu, Chinese migrants in Lesotho and Angola, interracial families, factories, racism, women traders, digital media, industrialisation and the much less spectacular business of simply trying to make a life somewhere between Africa and China.
This is not intended to be exhaustive. It is an evolving archive of some of the films that have shaped—or complicated—the ways Africa–China encounters have been represented on screen.
Roberto Castillo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His research examines transnational cultural flows, media representation, race, and migration, with a particular focus on South–South connections and the global circulation of diasporic imaginaries. He is the author of African Transnational Mobility in China: Africans on the Move (Routledge, 2021). His work has explored African mobilities in China, China–Africa relations in popular culture, and the racial politics of knowledge production. More recently, he has turned to investigating transnational gentrification, Asian influencer cultures in Latin America, and digital aesthetics in both Latin America and Asia.
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