Clara Law's Floating Life and Hong Kong-Australian 'flexible citizenship'

Abstract

Clara Law's film Floating Life was the first Australian film to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, and the first Australian film to deal with migrant Hong Kong Chinese identities 'from inside'. From perspectives of transnational Chinese migration and flexible citizenship, this article looks at Floating Life as a Hong Kong Chinese migrant reading of Australia, which defamiliarizes and recontextualizes familiar Australian localities and geopolitical formations, contrasting them with the film's other principal loci of Hong Kong and Germany. It also interprets the film as a neo-Confucian study of family disintegration in a migrant context, and an exploration of notions of home and identity.