Inventing the Asian community: The Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival as discourse and collective performance

Abstract

This article examines how the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival constructs an imagined Asian community and how spectators perform their cultural identities at screenings and on social media. By screening films from some Asian nations and diasporas and not others, and by screening a disproportionate number of films from East Asia, Reel Asian’s programming selections imply that some Asian societies are more Asian than others, and posit certain essentialized cultural practices associated with those societies as being emblematic of the Orient as a whole. At screenings and on social media, spectators position themselves either as insiders who identify with the Orient, or as westerners who imaginatively project themselves into an oriental culture through an act of sympathetic understanding. Through an analysis of the Reel Asian Film Festival, this article demonstrates how identity-based film festivals function as sites where an imagined community becomes visible to itself and the general public.