Yue Su

Background

I received my Bachelor of Arts in Chinese Language and Literature from Beijing Normal University in 2011. After graduation, I became a secondary school teacher in Xi’an, China for seven years, while completing my Master of Education (part-time) from Beijing Normal University in 2015. With a passion for films, I began my MA in Film & Television Studies (for Research) at the University of Warwick in 2018 and graduated with a Distinction. Since 2020, I have further pursued my research by becoming a PhD student in the Co-Tutelle PhD Programme in Global Screen Studies between the University of Warwick and Nagoya University in Japan, funded by Chancellor’s International Scholarship at Warwick. My research interests lie in cinematic kinship, East-Asian cinema, world cinema and queer cinema.

Doctoral Research

Liquid Kinship and the Cinema of Kore-eda Hirokazu

My PhD research proposes an original interdisciplinary field via the notion of ‘liquid kinship’. Liquid kinship, in the light of recent kinship studies, is best understood as a process of becoming and a practice of making instead of a solid structure embedded in social norms. It further serves as a notion in screen studies to address how the medium of cinema enables a unique way to imagine diverse and fluid forms of kinship that are not necessarily anchored in blood ties. In so doing, my thesis develops a methodological framework to analyse cinematic kinship through its case study of the contemporary Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu’s filmmaking.

Firstly, liquid kinship suggests that a kinship role is never self-evident but is an ongoing process of self-identification and re-identification in relation to other subjects. The process of making a kinship role can be vividly depicted through actors’ performances on-screen. Through this approach, I discuss five kinds of kinship roles in Kore-eda’s cinema: mothers, fathers, children, the elderly and the deceased, investigating how Kore-eda’s cinema challenges the solid kinship identities in Japan.

Secondly, liquid kinship is an everyday practice that constantly transforms a space into a place, therefore, the notion of home is not singular, enclosed and immobile but rather plural, porous and extensible. Focusing on the everyday practices of eating, bathing and moving in Kore-eda’s cinema, I observe how a liquid form of kinship flows from dining–kitchen areas to convenience shops (konbini), from bathrooms (furo) to the seaside, and from entryways (genkan) to stations.

Thirdly, liquid kinship is about a liquid feeling. It conveys the unarticulated, unregulated and unnoticed experiences of kinship that can be embodied via cinematic means. In so doing, I propose four ways of reading the feeling of liquid kinship – touch, temperature, sound and rhythm, by which to explore the tactile, sonic and kinaesthetic dimensions of cinematic kinship that exists beyond an ideal vision.

In sum, liquid kinship opens up the performative, spatial and sensory aspects with which to broaden our understanding of kinship via the medium of cinema. Liquid kinship, ultimately, is a way of thinking about how we have the possibility of becoming connected in this world via the practice of thinking about moving images.

Supervisors: Professor Alastair Philips and Professor Hideaki Fujiki (Nagoya University)

Publications

Liquid Kinship and the Cinema of Kore-eda Hirokazu (in preparation – invited by the editor of Bloomsbury book series ‘World Cinema’).

‘Liquidity and Stillness: The Sea and Shore and the Furo in Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Cinema’, Somatechnics 13.2 (2023), pp. 73-90. <https://www.euppublishing.com/toc/soma/13/2Link opens in a new window>

This article was granted an honourable mention for the ‘Best Published Essay by a Doctoral Student’ in the 2024 BAFTSS publication awards.

Conference Papers

• ‘Queer Kinship across Space and Time’ Conference, University of Oxford, 10 April 2025, ‘Queering Kinship Through Tactile Gestures On-Screen’.

• British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Conference, University of Warwick, 27 March 2025, ‘Queer Children and the (Im)possibility of ‘Growing Sideways’ in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster (2023)’. (also as panel organiser)

• Kinema Club conference ‘Borders, Boundaries, Edges, and Fringes in Japanese Film (Studies)’, University of Sheffield, 12 June 2024, ‘Kore-eda Hirokazu: Through the Lens of Liquid Kinship’.
• Mediating Kinship Salon (organised by the editors of ‘Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference’), online, 22 February 2024, ‘Liquid Kinship: Through the Cinema of Kore-eda Hirokazu’.
• Joint Seminar, Nagoya University, 7 November 2023, ‘Performative Remembering and Forgetting: The Deceased in Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Cinema’.
• Joint Seminar, Nagoya University, 6 June 2023, ‘Liquid Kinship: The Cinema of Kore-eda Hirokazu (Introduction)’.
• British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Conference, University of Lincoln, 5 April 2023, ‘Children, Risk Society and Liquid Kinship in Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Cinema’.
• Association for Asian Studies Conference, online, 19 February 2023, ‘The Homes of the Elderly in the Cinema of Kore-eda Hirokazu’.
• ‘Motherhoods on Screen: Global Perspectives’ Conference, online, 24 September 2022, ‘Relocating and Dislocating: Obstructed Liquidity of Motherhood in Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Cinema’.
• British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Conference, online, 23 April 2022, ‘The Thermal Spaces of Kinship in Shoplifters’.
• Department of Film and Television Studies Research Day, University of Warwick, 18 May 2022, ‘From Solid to Liquid Kinship: The Becoming of Fatherhood in Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Like Father, Like Son’.
• Department of Film and Television Studies Research Day, online, 19 May 2021 ‘Kinship, Place and Space in the Cinema of Kore-eda Hirokazu’.

Conference Organisation

• ‘Forms and Feelings of Kinship in the Contemporary World’ (University of Warwick, 27 April 2024). Doctoral Fellowship Competition winner. Funded by Humanities Research Centre. See more details on the conference website.

• Film and Television Studies Departmental Research Day 2024 (University of Warwick, 15 May 2024). Co-organised with Dr. Hande Çayır.

Teaching

• FI210/FI353 Queer Screens (GTA, leading two seminar groups, giving a guest lecture on Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster, Term 1, 2024/2025)

• FI111-15 Film and Television Criticism (GTA, leading three seminar groups, Term 2, 2023/24)
• FI204 World Cinema (GTA, leading three seminar groups, Term 1, 2022/23)
• FI360 Postwar Japanese Cinema (GTA, leading two seminar groups, giving a guest lecture on kinship and Kore-eda Hirokazu, Term 2, 2022/23)

Contact

yue.su@warwick.ac.uk

suyue926@163.com

Shoplifters (2018)

Still Walking (2008)