Inventing the Asian community: The Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival as discourse and collective performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines how the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival constructs an imagined Asian community and how spectators perform their cultural identities at screenings and on social media. By screening films from some Asian nations and diasporas and not others, and by screening a disproportionate number of films from East Asia, Reel Asian’s programming selections imply that some Asian societies are more Asian than others, and posit certain essentialized cultural practices associated with those societies as being emblematic of the Orient as a whole. At screenings and on social media, spectators position themselves either as insiders who identify with the Orient, or as westerners who imaginatively project themselves into an oriental culture through an act of sympathetic understanding. Through an analysis of the Reel Asian Film Festival, this article demonstrates how identity-based film festivals function as sites where an imagined community becomes visible to itself and the general public.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".