Hengdian World Studios is China’s largest film studio, a major center for producing historical dramas that attract thousands of rural migrant workers to work for unsteady wages as background actors. But increased political censorship of historical dramas, the popularity of digital video platforms, and the low wages of background acting encourages many Hengdian migrants to earn money in monetized live video streams that celebrate their broke and aspirational status as hengpiao, or Hengdian drifters. This ethnographic film introduces viewers to Hengdian’s cultural worlds by examining the motivations of several Hengdian drifters.
Produced in New York University’s Program in Culture and Media, Hengdian Dreaming has screened at the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Ethnographic Film Festival (London), Ethnofest (Athens), and has been used in courses at NYU, Duke University, National Chengchi University, and the University of Hong Kong. The film was featured in the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s Visual and New Media Review and received an honorable mention for the Society for East Asian Anthropology’s 2022 David Plath Media Award.
“Shayan Momin’s Hengdian Dreaming (2021) is many things at once: a visual collage of daily life in one of China’s filmmaking centers, an examination of the changing nature of digital and creative labor through livestreaming, and a meditation on the ways people create meaning together through sometimes grinding poverty and simultaneous elation at pursuing their artistic dreams. Skillfully weaving together the voices of several “Hengdian drifters” interspersed with clips of their time spent between work as background actors building side hustles as livestreamers or honing their crafts in the creative arts, the film immersively brings the viewer into the liminal space destined to part-time extras and aspiring artists drawn to the city of Hengdian, in Zhejiang Province, home to one of the world’s largest filmmaking studios.” Racquel Lee
https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/racquel-lee-hengdian
“Vapors ascend during the opening titles to suggest that what seems to be is not what truly is. The prosumer camera then gradually intersects with Chinese mobile content creation—the stress here rests on mobile. From the start, Momin’s sober, participative, and thoroughly informed camerawork immerses the viewer in Hengdian’s multifaceted layering of media worlds, with its shifting re-enactments of Chinese life past and present, all the while punctuated by the skillful calligraphy of one of his participants. Located to the southwest of Shanghai, Hengdian is home to thousands of people seeking to fulfill their dreams in China’s largest film and television production studio—also one of the largest worldwide, easily identifiable due to its replica of the imperial-era Old Summer Palace—as actors and actresses. However, available work on set rarely yields more than background acting in narrative films rife with historical dramatizations. This seems to matter little to labor-seeking newcomers as they become integral to the city’s downtown nightly cost-effective entertainment banquet. These aspiring actors and actresses, in their roles as hengpiao (“Hengdian drifters”), stream their festive and leisure activities on Chinese platforms like douyin (known as TikTok to the rest of the world) and kuaishou. The tables then turn as the hengpiao enlist audience members as temporary workers to partake in their entrepreneurial production of media. This dynamic atmosphere is deftly captured by Momin’s on-camera and screen-recordings, opening multiple avenues of interpretation instead of offering judgements or ready-made answers. Do hengpiao deserve the condescending attitudes so-called precarious labor is generally met with? Are we witnessing the resocialization or reappropriation of platform capitalism? Are historical reenactments of a glorious Chinese imperial past being displaced by the burgeoning mediated frenzy of live-streamed performance, perhaps contra national prerogatives? Hengdian Dreaming (2021) acts as a theory-laden media intervention that reveals arising modalities and attitudes towards work in a digital age, as well as exposing how these forms of labor are posing a challenge to state-sponsored reifications of the model worker in China (maybe also elsewhere).”
Alejandro Jaramillo
https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/series/hengdian-dreaming-2021
Speaker: Shayan Momin (New York University-Shanghai)
Shayan Momin is a cultural anthropologist and filmmaker. He received his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from New York University in 2025 and is currently a Global Perspectives on Society postdoctoral fellow at NYU Shanghai. His dissertation examines the production of class and media at Hengdian World Studios, one of the largest film studios in the world. His ethnographic film, Hengdian Dreaming, was made through NYU’s Program in Culture and Media. The film follows “Hengdian drifters” (hengpiao 横漂) as they attempt to escape the humiliation of waged work and unemployment through various forms of cultural production. Hengdian Dreaming has screened at the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival in London, the Ethnofest festival in Athens, and received an honorable mention for the David Plath Media Award from the Society for East Asian Anthropology in 2022. Shayan’s research and filmmaking have received support from the Society for Visual Anthropology, the Association for Asian Studies, the Fulbright Program, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Discussants:
Teri Silvio (Institute of Ethnology)
Beatrice Zani (CEFC)
Moderator:
Derek Sheridan (Institute of Ethnology)
