PASSE-AVANT Editor Sophie has met with Echo, the Founder of the Berlin based non-profit organisation CiLENS, a curatorial platform with an interest in Sinophone cinema. CiLENS first launched their program with the film series New Women, New Narrative, focussing on feminist movements in China, 2022, and held their first Indie Chinese Cinema Week in various locations in Berlin in the same year. Since then the program has continuously expanded. With a community driven approach, CiLENS created a platform to involve an international audience in questions of diasporic experiences, migration, gender as well as labour.

Sophie: Can you tell us about your initial idea — with which intention did you bring CiLENS to life?

Echo: CiLENS emerged from a very personal experience of migration, and at the same time perhaps part of a more universal diasporic condition. Throughout my twenties I moved between different cities and cultural contexts — from Shanghai to New York, to London, briefly Jerusalem, and later from Beijing to Berlin. That period was very much driven by an energetic curiosity, trying to grapple with the world beyond the environment I had grown up in. When I arrived in Berlin, knowing I would be here for more than a year, something shifted. I became consciously aware of myself as someone perceived from the outside — as Chinese, as Asian, as a newcomer. But what affected me most was not identity itself, but the question of belonging. I didn't study here before, I didn't know anyone yet. And I started to realise that actually, so many people living here had also moved from somewhere else.

So the question became: how can I find a way to create, at least temporarily, a space for meaningful encounters? How can I find people who are also navigating questions of home, of belonging, of loneliness? And cinema, documentary cinema especially, became a very natural answer. Before moving to Berlin I had been working in Beijing as a producer, mostly on documentary projects. Film was already central to how I understand and relate to the world. So that was the initial idea.

Sophie: With cinema at the core of CiLENS you've also explored Q&A’s, talks, workshops, performances, communal gatherings. How do you think about format?

Echo: Cinema remains at the core of my curatorial practice, and film screenings are still one of the most powerful ways of bringing people together in a shared temporal and spatial experience: sitting in a dark room with strangers, watching the same images unfold, experiencing something collectively. But I have never understood cinema as an isolated art form. I tend to see film as part of a broader ecology of socially engaged cultural practice, which is also how I position CiLENS as a collective. I didn't come to film curation primarily as a cinephile. 

What attracted me was its capacity of creating spaces for encounter, dialogue, participation and belonging.

Different formats create different modes of participation: a screening invites collective viewing, a workshop encourages contribution, a performance creates embodied experience, and informal gatherings allow relationships to develop beyond the event itself. Starting from the first edition of Indie Chinese Cinema Week, I was already exploring beyond screenings — talks, salons, discourse programmes. People linger in the physical space longer, spending time with each other. The first year I also went to Paris on a research residency, they have a long tradition of Chinese alternative film festivals there, and came back to Berlin with some takeaways. But honestly, the first year was mostly navigating alone. There's a Chinese saying: mo zhe shi tou guo he. You don't know the water, so you feel for the stones to cross the river. That was the first year. But it also laid the curatorial foundation for CiLENS as I understand it now.

Sophie: How do you think about mediating nuances of language like dialects and accents for an audience that may not perceive them?

Echo: From the very first edition of Indie Chinese Cinema Week I realised that the audience really is as diverse as Berlin itself: people from Chinese and Sinophone communities, Asian diasporic backgrounds, audiences from Germany, Europe, and many other parts of the world. And I think what always surprises me is how audiences connect emotionally with films rooted in very specific Chinese contexts, factory workers in Zhejiang, social realities in rural Sichuan, and transpose those stories onto their own experiences. A film about migrant workers in China may invoke memories of displacement for someone from Turkey or Latin America. A story about family expectation can resonate deeply with someone who has never been to China at all. And then there's the question of language within Chinese cinema itself. I've come to agree very much with the framework proposed by Shu-mei Shih. I didn't know her work at all when I started the Indie Chinese Cinema Week, but looking back I realised my curatorial decisions were actually resonating closely with what she proposed: that Sinophone is not a national category, but a linguistic and cultural formation. What attracted me to the concept was that it shifted the focus from essence to relation. Rather than asking what a Chinese identity is, it allows us to ask how different Chinese-speaking communities are connected, and how those connections coexist with profound differences in history, politics, and lived experience.

When I was curating, I was very conscious of trying to balance works from ethnic minorities alongside Han Chinese perspectives — from Tibetan filmmakers, from communities whose languages are as foreign to me as German. And in doing so I became aware of something interesting: the position from which I viewed those films was very similar to the position of a first-time German viewer coming to so-called Chinese cinema. My unfamiliarity made me curious, made them feel new. That's a useful reminder of how much the perspective of the viewer shapes the encounter.

I think also many people come to screenings first because they are curious about contemporary China — sometimes specifically the political dimension, films that engage with social realities that haven't had much space for discussion. But very often they leave lingering on much larger questions: how we make sense of ourselves as citizens, as family members, as people living in the world in the current era.

Sophie: CiLENS launched with the series New Women, New Narratives, focused on feminist movements in China. Can you talk about that first programme?

Echo: A feminist perspective has always been central to my research interests and my curatorial practice. It's one of the most important pillars, for me personally, of understanding who I am and what I want to do. So when I started thinking about what I wanted to present first, exploring stories of women in the contemporary Chinese context was a very natural answer.

I was reading feminist researchers, one Chinese scholar teaching in the US who wrote about how the modernisation of China is actually the modernisation of women in China and it made me reflect on a lot from personal experience. So that became the starting point. The first screening was a documentary about the poet Yu Xiuhua. She became famous overnight after posting her poems online. She was a farmer with a disability, living in the countryside, someone whose physical condition and social capital had never allowed her to set foot in a big city. But through the internet, her work spread across China overnight. A documentary filmmaker followed her as she became a public intellectual, able to speak on publicly recognised platforms. What I found fascinating was also the translation aspect. Her poetry had already been translated into English, which meant that for the screening we could print her poems and distribute them in the space, in English. Non-Chinese speakers could encounter her work directly. That connection between image and language, between film and printed text felt very right for what CiLENS was trying to do.

Sophie: Questions of transnationality and migration run throughout CiLENS's work. But you've also said the term diaspora is becoming a little vague. How has your thinking shifted?

Echo: I think diaspora is becoming vague in terms of capturing the full complexity of contemporary lives. My own experience, for example: I live literally between China and Berlin. I return frequently. My experience is less about departure or exile than about movement, circulation, and ongoing negotiation between different cultural contexts. And many friends I've made here who were born or grew up in Germany still have roots in China and visit occasionally.

When I was younger I cared deeply about representation and challenging stereotypes. As a Chinese person studying and living abroad, you are often confronted with assumptions about your English, about what China is, about what Asian identity means. Even when you don't actively seek to engage with identity politics, you find yourself drawn in, because these categories shape how people perceive and relate to each other. But my thinking has gradually shifted. Today I find myself more interested in what happens after representation. What becomes possible once people no longer have to spend all their energy explaining themselves or proving the legitimacy of their existence? This is also the curatorial direction of the current edition of Asian Queers United, a programme I've been developing that spans narratives of Asian queer lives across Asia, not only the Sinophone world. I took that cue partly from Virginia Woolf: 'As a woman I have no country.' The gendered and queer experience can be more central to someone's life than any national or civic belonging. So it makes more sense to curate across that spectrum.

From identity politics to world-making — that's how I'd describe the shift.

I remain interested in identity, but not as an endpoint. What interests me more is how people create meaningful forms of belonging across cultures, histories, and geographies. I care more and more about what happens after you choose to stay in the world you inherit, or after you choose to leave and build something new. Those questions are constantly emerging, changing, shaping.

Sophie: Labour is one of CiLENS's four thematic pillars. How does it appear in the films you choose to show?

Echo: Many documentaries I've shown or been drawn to after watching pay attention to labour in different forms — sometimes directly to rights and conditions, but often more tenderly than that. Wang Bing's Youth Trilogy is the clearest example. Two of those films I showed at Indie Chinese Cinema Week. They've been described as sensitive, and I understand why there might be concern. But actually, watching them, they are really about following people's personal lives; what they spend their time on, day after day, beyond the professional label of 'factory worker.' They live together, make jokes, play music, celebrate birthdays, try to find love online, try to get married. And of course they also negotiate salaries, which happens to everyone. It was also my experience while working in Beijing.

I chose to show those films because I really believe in Wang Bing's method: not leaving a singular critical comment on labour conditions in East Coastal factories, but following these people as individuals, as a small group of friends and colleagues, in their daily lives. And I think the final episode Homecoming is the one that lingers most. It follows workers as they eventually return to their hometowns. And these questions: should I go home, do I want to go back, what does it mean to return — those are questions that linger in so many of our lives, whatever our circumstances.

Sophie: What's Next?

Echo: CiLENS has grown out of four years of Indie Chinese Cinema Week into something larger. The platform Re:Frame, a Berlin-based curatorial initiative for East and Southeast Asian moving image and its diasporas, grows from that foundation, working across disciplines and bringing moving image into dialogue with performance, sound, and public space.

Furthermore CiLENS expands their program through new collaborative formats. Our next collaborative event with Gassenprojects takes place in Frankfurt am Main, entitled Minor Landscapes, a film screening at Mal Seh'n Kino on 5 July 2026, with an accompanying publication and Video Art exhibition running from 5 to 12 July.

Upcoming:
05.07.2026

Minor Landscapes

Mal Seh'n Kino, Frankfurt am Main

CiLENS in collaboration with Gassenprojetcs