Tracing Troeung

Mila Zuo is an associate professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her book, Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium (Duke UP, 2022) won Outstanding Achievement best book award in media, performance, and visual studies from the Association for Asian American Studies. She is interested in transnational Asian cinemas, film-philosophy, abject and enchanted epistemologies, and critical theories of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and decolonization. In addition to her scholarly work, Zuo is a filmmaker whose award-winning short films have screened at numerous international film festivals and universities. 

Lee Jung Soo is an MA student in Cinema and Media Studies at UBC. His research interest is in Samuel Beckett’s TV plays. Previously, his thesis was to be a reflection on Korean mass media and its ideology analyzed through reality TV shows. His segment explores some of the ideas that were abandoned. 

Jasmine Sanau is an MA student in the UBC Cinema and Media Studies department. She completed her BA Hon. at UBC in 2023 and continues her research interests of non-Western epistemologies, eco-cinema, elemental cinema, ghosts, and cannibals. Her previous works focused on the sleep cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the hauntology of Fruit Chan and Tsai Ming Liang, and Kogonada’s inscrutable Asian American. 

Chuiwen (Wen) Kong is a second-year MA student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of British Columbia. She holds an MA in Film Studies and a BA in Education Studies from University College London, UK. She presented her video essay entitled “Faces Unveiled” at the 2024 Film Philosophy Conference. She has recently presented “The Minor Gest(ure), Cinema’s Intertextual Dives” at the 2025 SCMS (Society for Cinema & Media Studies) conference, and her video essay “The Unbearable Light(ness) of Palestine” at the 2025 ACSS conference. 

Jonathan Liu is a graduate student in the cinema and media studies department at the University of British Columbia. His research interest is in Chinese transnational cinema, film noir, and the figure of flâneur.