FILM/VIDEO
These Days, These Homes
(in production)
The time to home, the way to home
(2025)
Commissioned for the group show, "Our Gaze: Art, Anthropology, and Asian Imagery" at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts Museum, March-May 2025.
Three channel video, single channel audio, four wooden stools.
Three channel video, single channel audio, four wooden stools.
农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness
(2013)
TRAILER: vimeo.com/jennychio/trailer
70 minutes, digital video, color
Distributed by Berkeley Media, LLC
AWARDS: 2013 Plath Media Award, given by the Society for East Asian Anthropology
Honorable Mention (medium-long/feature film category),
2017 Heritales: International Heritage Film Festival, Évora, Portugal
ONLINE INTERVIEW: Cultural Anthropology Screening Room
70 minutes, digital video, color
Distributed by Berkeley Media, LLC
AWARDS: 2013 Plath Media Award, given by the Society for East Asian Anthropology
Honorable Mention (medium-long/feature film category),
2017 Heritales: International Heritage Film Festival, Évora, Portugal
ONLINE INTERVIEW: Cultural Anthropology Screening Room
农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness depicts the everyday experience of “doing tourism” (搞旅游) in two rural ethnic tourism villages in contemporary China: Ping’an in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and Upper Jidao in Guizhou province. In these villages, residents negotiate between the day-to-day consequences of tourist arrivals and idealized projections of who they are.
REVIEWS:
"Chio's film is a gentle, and thought-provoking, excursion into the ordinary life of tourism. It is accessible to non-China specialists, addressing as it does the key issues of tourism development in general." Visual Anthropology Review 30(1): 79-81, reviewed by Laurie Kain Hart.
"[农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness] provides us with a rich and vivid account of the challenges of developing and sustaining rural tourism from the vantage point of rural communities. It provides students with a contemporary view of rural China, which in the southwest is characterized by the commodification of ethnicity and striking economic polarization between China’s urban and rural residents."
American Anthropologist 115(3): 507-509, reviewed by Emily Chao.
"...the film opens a whole range of important questions to be further discussed, debated, and reflected upon. Therefore, I strongly recommend it to an audience and students who are interested in indigenous responses to and consequences of tourism development, as well as in ethnicity and rural development in China."
Pacific Affairs (2016), reviewed by Tenzin Jinba.
REVIEWS:
"Chio's film is a gentle, and thought-provoking, excursion into the ordinary life of tourism. It is accessible to non-China specialists, addressing as it does the key issues of tourism development in general." Visual Anthropology Review 30(1): 79-81, reviewed by Laurie Kain Hart.
"[农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness] provides us with a rich and vivid account of the challenges of developing and sustaining rural tourism from the vantage point of rural communities. It provides students with a contemporary view of rural China, which in the southwest is characterized by the commodification of ethnicity and striking economic polarization between China’s urban and rural residents."
American Anthropologist 115(3): 507-509, reviewed by Emily Chao.
"...the film opens a whole range of important questions to be further discussed, debated, and reflected upon. Therefore, I strongly recommend it to an audience and students who are interested in indigenous responses to and consequences of tourism development, as well as in ethnicity and rural development in China."
Pacific Affairs (2016), reviewed by Tenzin Jinba.
Film the People (2003)
This student film aims at re-presenting the presentation of minority nationality groups in the People's Republic of China. The source material is a series of historic ethnographic films dating from 1957-1966. The film reformulates the process of representation, manipulating the film images and sounds in order to produce a multifaceted understanding of ethnicity in China, the visualization of knowledge, and the imagining of a nation.
The film was produced as part of the MA Visual Anthropology program at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Financial support for the film was generously provided by the Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, and the former Institute for Knowledge and Media (IWF), Göttingen, Germany. The historic ethnographic films from China are now held at the German National Library of Science and Technology, University Library Hannover.
The film was produced as part of the MA Visual Anthropology program at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Financial support for the film was generously provided by the Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, and the former Institute for Knowledge and Media (IWF), Göttingen, Germany. The historic ethnographic films from China are now held at the German National Library of Science and Technology, University Library Hannover.