The first of three short films based on my BEAST research has been released!

Extremely timely given the controversies sparked by CBBC’s Living with the Lams.

Through collaboration with the award-winning independent film-maker Rosa Fong, verbatim dialogue from research interviews conducted for my BEAST project has been restaged in the form of classic British film or TV dramas in a series of short films to highlight the invisibility and misrepresentation of British East Asians on British mainstream screens and show why this occurs despite the proliferation of diversity discourses in recent years.

With the talented actors Jennifer Lim, Siu Hun Li and Colin Ryan.

Though the research is still on-going, the first episode deals with many issues raised by the LWTL furore.

Whassup with the Wongs:

  • begins to highlight the marginalization of British East Asian writers in the commissioning process
  • suggests that the requirements of ‘experience’ needed to gain work may differ for white and British East Asian writers
  • demonstrates how the ideas of British East Asian writers may be appropriated, while they themselves are excluded
  • shows how little value is placed on empowering British East Asians writers
  • and shows how, by contrast, it is deemed entirely unproblematic for a British East Asian narrative to be authored by writers with no knowledge or experience of British East Asian life
  • hints at the risks of the production and perpetuation of racial stereotypes by such writers
  • attests more widely to the racialized – and racist – construction of British East Asians in British society as a ‘joke’
  • unmasks the precarious position of British East Asian writers in the difficulties they experience in speaking out
  • exposes their maltreatment in being expected to undertake work for no payment

See https://twitter.com/beastshortfilms for more info and click here to view the film.