Jeesoon Hong in “The Ritual of Memory and Reframing of the Family Album in Dead to Rights” (南京照相馆, Dir. Shen Ao 申奥, 2025) analyzes the 2025 Chinese box office hit, which was released in July 2025 in China and in August in the United States. Directed by Shen Ao, known for his popular social movies, Dead to Rights has been breaking box office records since its release. In tune with a series of grand-scale celebrations marking the 80th anniversary of the victory in the Anti-Japanese War, the film reaffirms the commercial success of so-called "main melody" blockbusters such as Wolf Warrior 2 (2017) and The Battle at Lake Changjin (2021). Loosely based on a real story from the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, the film is an adaptation of the 1987 movie Massacre in Nanjing (屠城血證). Unlike its predecessor, Dead to Rights shifts the focus to the medium of photography and the space of a local photo studio. The film raises important questions about the internal relationship between family and photography, the roles of media in sharing and archiving, and the tensions between propaganda and professionalism. While referencing other films about the Nanjing massacre — including City of Life and Death (南京!南京!, 2009) — this paper focuses on themes of family, photography, the territorial sublime, and (collective, post-, prosthetic) memory.
In “Recreating Chinese Mythology and Chinese Diasporic Identities in Pixar’s Turning Red,” Kaby Wing-Sze Kung examines a recent Pixar film portraying the story of a thirteen-year-old Chinese Canadian girl, Meilin Lee, who transforms into a red panda due to an ancient mythical connection that allows women in her family to protect their children during wartime. The film was released on Disney+ during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2022 and was not given a theatrical release until February 2024. In the film, Meilin’s family serves as the guardians of the Red Panda Temple, located in Toronto’s Chinatown. While the red panda is native to China and Himalayan countries, it does not play a significant role in traditional Chinese mythology but, rather, marks the effort of the film director, Domee Shi, to craft a new form of Chinese mythology for an audience unfamiliar with Chinese mythic culture or seeking to reexamine traditional Chinese cultural narratives. Through Mei’s character, the film addresses the notion of blood as a coming-of-age trope for menstruation, as an examination of mother-daughter relationships, and as a means of embracing forms of cultural hybridity faced by Chinese diasporic subjects.
Finally, in “AI, Queer Kinship, and the Ethics of Care in Silvia Park’s Luminous,” Richard Bonfiglio considers a recent work of speculative fiction published in March that depicts a politically unified Korean peninsula several decades in the future. In their first novel, Park imagines the bloody aftermath of unification achieved through war, genocide, and new AI technologies. Like recent novels such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and Cheon Seon-Ran’s A Thousand Blues (천 개의 파랑), Luminous reflects on family relations through a robot-centered plot but differs from such works in its focus on same-sex desire and transgender identity. The novel encourages readers to rethink “kinship beyond the bloodline” in both queer (Butler, Freeman, Bradway) and posthuman (Haraway, Giffney, Hird) terms and forces it audience to ponder what it means, as Bruno Latour memorably articulates, “to care for our technologies.” To do so, the novel’s sibling protagonists (Morgan and Jun) must confront various forms of personal and collective trauma: their scientist father’s donation of their robot brother (Yoyo) to a military program, AI-induced genocide, and the loss of 78% of Jun’s body fighting in the war.