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This chapter continues the focus on the intersection between diaspora and intimacy by exploring the teaching of the film in Australia as part of the political pedagogy of critical multiculturalism. It illustrates how Song of the Exile cultivates a transcultural literacy that challenges the hegemonic currency of neoliberal multicultural education. It starts by presenting a critical introduction to the role of film as a form of public pedagogy, and problematizes the inclusion of Hong Kong cinema in a pluralist multicultural curriculum. It then demonstrates the minor cinema of Song of the Exile through its diasporic film distribution in Australia. In addition, it reveals how the minor cinema of Song of the Exile is deployed in a site-specific encounter for transcultural literacy. Moreover, the film is critically described as a performative text for border pedagogy. It is shown how a deconstructive pedagogical critical practice is possible by considering the diasporic circulation of the film as an excentric, oppositional, and decentred formation that speaks directly to the exigency of Hong Kong modernity.

In contrast to the hegemonic operations of “global Hollywood,” Hong Kong martial arts films of the late 1960s and 1970s exemplify a case of “minor transnationalism” in adhering to more “lateral” and nonhierarchical network structures and modes of exchange. This can be seen not just in the way Hong Kong’s cosmopolitan film culture in the period, one with a strong presence of American, Japanese, and European cinema, provided an array of ideas and styles which local martial arts films drew upon in developing a new idiom for the articulation of the complex experience of modern life. No less important are the micropractices of transnationality in the other direction: the efforts to open up regional/international markets, and the interactions with other “minor” action genres. As a “contact zone,” martial arts/action cinema of the era constituted a symbolic space of exchange in which films from diverse national origins, often with different textual, cultural, and ideological materials, met and acted upon one another to produce not only new hybrid texts but also new forms of identification that actively negotiated with national, racial, and other types of identity boundaries.

This chapter traces how, traditionally, feminist analyses of films authored by women tended to centre on experimental or art-house cinema and, subsequently, on genres culturally codified as ‘female’. It then goes on to engage with the most important debates around the concept of ‘women’s cinema’ and their significance in relation to genre theory. In particular, Alison Butler’s insights into women’s cinema as ‘minor cinema’, adapted from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1975) concept of the minor – as an alternative to the negative aesthetics of counter-cinema – is particularly apt here, as it allows for a reconsideration of women’s film authorship in mainstream productions and the ‘major’ language of film genres. Following and expanding this concept, it is argued that genres can be particularly productive spaces from which to think about female filmmakers, film authorship and the cultural politics of gender (especially in terms of the status of the woman author or her lack of status), as will be explored in the following chapters. Finally, instead of locking women filmmakers into a segregated gender sphere defined by ‘women’s culture’, the chapter argues for the mutability of gendered identities and questions the oversimplified notion of gender-to-gender cinematic identification – a typical assumption underpinning the categorisation of genres by gender – and suggests that ‘opportunities for resistance are more available than the opposition between “dominant cinema” and “counter-cinema” allows’ (Cook 2012: 33).