Against Flow, With Constraint: Curating Independent Film Culture in Wuhan

Abstract This article investigates the Wuhan bailin Film Festival (WbFF) to explore the persistence of independent film cultures under China’s shifting media regulations. Operating since 2022, WbFF offers a salient case of informal curatorship, where grassroots cultural workers bring into public view films rarely accessible from China’s formal circuits. Rather than relying on the prevailing metaphor of “flow,” which presumes continuity, smoothness, and centralized control, the article proposes “constraint” as a critical analytic for understanding the friction and mediation that characterize unofficial screening practices. Drawing on interviews and documentation across three festival editions, it shows how constraint not only conditions the movement of films, but also structures the labor required to make such movement possible. Through this lens, this article illuminates the situated, piecemeal, and affective efforts of self-directed curators who navigate precarious settings to create moments of visibility for underrepresented films. In doing so, it invites a practice-based approach to “independence,” reframing the question from what independence means to how it is enacted. Taken as a whole, this regionally grounded study contributes to scholarship on Chinese independent cinema, while offering broader insights into curatorial labor, grassroots film festivals, and the uneven infrastructures that underpin film circulation.