Towards a poor cinema: ubiquitous trafficking and poverty as problematic in Midi Z’s films

Abstract

In his seminal essay, ‘Towards a Poor Theatre’, Jerzy Grotowski advocates a new form of theatre that will strip itself to the bone in order to reveal the quintessential nature of the art form. Borrowing this notion for the medium of cinema, this article proposes that the production practice of the Burmese-Taiwanese director Midi Z operates on a similar principle of a skeletal scale that demands a rethink about the nature of cinema. Midi Z’s homecoming trilogy, which comprises his first three feature-length films, was shot on a shoestring budget involving minimal cast and crew. This article seeks to advance, in the spirit of Grotowski’s conception, poverty as a paradoxically positive premise for a mode of filmmaking that will be termed ‘poor cinema’. It draws on Midi Z’s filmmaking career to illustrate two dimensions of poor cinema: the ubiquity of trafficking as a condition of production, and poverty as a problematic in the diegeses of the films. It argues that Midi Z’s poor cinema sets out to circumvent censorship through trafficking and, in this invariably transnational modus operandi, also to stage poverty as a problematic that interrogates the ethics and aesthetics of filmmaking.