Since 2010, Chinese independent cinema has kept moving, altering how it looks and how it speaks to us. The xianchang legacy of independent documentary persists yet no longer defines the field; Sixth Generation realism cedes ground to genre play and hybrid forms. As film scholar Kiki Yu observes, after 2012 the contraction of informal networks and tightening of compliance reshaped circulation, leading many filmmakers to describe their works as “independently produced” within smaller outfits. The result was not disappearance but a regrouping of practices. What appears in our selections—deadpan stasis and offbeat comedy, haunted ruins and docu-fiction drift, digital memorial terrains, freeze-thaw littoral labor and rail-borne drift—suggests not a single mainland but an archipelago: discrete islets of form and address linked by risky crossings. Gilles Deleuze (1953) once wrote that "dreaming of islands is…dreaming of pulling away…or it is dreaming of starting from scratch". Our series takes that image both literally and figuratively: films that secede from familiar tempos or genres, and films that begin anew. Each an island that makes its own weather yet speaks to others across the water. Together these works map a post-2010 ecology where resourcefulness meets constraint, and where independence names less a market category than a tactic of survival and renewal today.
