She Sings for the World

She Sings for The World is a 19-minute hybrid fiction film about a son that sets out to make a film about his mother, who was formerly known as the first Chinese Opera singer to have sung and translated Pingju Opera into English in late 1980’s China. Through an integrated examination of Pingju Opera mythology and auto-ethnography, She Sings for the World explores cultural identity translation between a mother and son through an intersectional application of hybrid realism, fossil archives, and ambivalence aesthetics. Combining the mother’s actual presence and story to the son’s virtual process of making a film about a son making a film about a mother, the thesis serves as an endpoint in the son’s attempt to find an authentic third space within cross-cultural translation, and a starting point in embracing interdisciplinary collaboration, cultural pluralism, and intercultural ambivalence as methods for examining cultural identity through film.