Chinese Filmmaker between Empires - Kong Ngee film enterprise and its dialect films, 1930-1970

In recent decades, scholars have identified an accelerating process of dislocation since the mid-nineteenth century, involving the mobilisation of people, things, ideas and images across space and time. In Asia in particular, scholars have identified the role of colonial cities as crossroads for a variety of sojourners motivated by religious, economic and social goals. Against this academic backdrop, a growing number of scholars have come to see 'Asia' as a flexible, fluid and contested concept, rather than understanding its history as rooted in inherent national differences. Much of this work has focused on the history of ideas, people and materials in motion in places in and around Southeast Asia during the colonial period. What this fluidity has meant for different facets of social life at different historical moments and with different geographical expressions is still being explored. It is against this background that this paper has undertaken a study of the history of the Kong Ngee film company and the dialect films it produced from the 1940s to the 1970s.  Based on primary sources, this paper aims to rediscover the human connections and shared cultural heritage of Hong Kong and Singapore within the multicultural environment of film production and consumption. Situated in a critical and contested time and space, the filmmakers of Kong Ngee not only created cinematic products that catered to the popular tastes of the post-war baby boomers, but also responded to and spoke to competing visions of city and nation building in post-World War II Asia.