Shanghai is one of the world's most climate-vulnerable major cities (rising sea levels, land subsidence, and an increased frequency of heat waves and typhoons). Rather than relocating its most vulnerable citizens, the city has adopted mitigation programs on a massive scale and speed (Shanghai 2035 Plan). Professor Jessie Keyt’s research and teaching over the past several years have focused on how the dominant Western narrative paradigm (hero-centric, tight causality, linear time, tidy resolutions) is problematic for the climate storyteller, freighted as it is with petroculture values. As co-author of Alternative Scriptwriting: Contemporary Storytelling for the Screen (Routledge, 2023), cofounder of Global Rise: Stories for the Future, and a climate storyteller who has led workshops for Sundance, the Torino Film Lab, the Venice Biennale, and NYU, Professor Keyt has been systematically mapping the shortfalls of this paradigm and looking for traditions that operate from different assumptions.
With its use of cyclical rather than linear time, collective rather than individual agency, and the integration of humans and the natural world, Chinese cinema evokes a narrative tradition rooted in Daoist philosophy. Contemporary filmmakers like Jia Zhangke, Bi Gan, Zhao Liang, Wang Bing, and (the controversial) Zhang Yimou work directly from this inheritance, drawing on classical shanshui landscape traditions to create non-linear, contemplative narrative structures that resist individual resolution. While Western cinema tends to treat the screen as a window to peer through--or a mind that thinks and resolves--Daoist cinema opens onto a space where all things, human and non-human alike, simply coexist, held in tension between presence and absence, motion and stillness, fullness and void.
Drawing on the scholarship of Kiki Tianqi Yu ("Cinematic ideorealm and cinema following Dao: theorizing film aesthetics through Daoism"), Professor Keyt will deepen her understanding of Chinese cinema and explore the alternatives it offers for effectively conveying the climate crisis. If appropriate, Professor Keyt will synthesize her research into a creative response in the form of a narrative screenplay that reflects her conversations with contemporary Chinese filmmakers and the principles of Daoist cinema.
Local Engagement Proposal:
In addition to the conversations with the aforementioned scholars and filmmakers, which I hope the site can help me arrange, the most natural fit for me at NYU Shanghai would be a conversational roundtable on these topics with any interested and engaged students and local or visiting faculty. I would love for this to exist as a series of biweekly 'brown bag lunches' where we discuss these ideas together, rather than a hierarchical presentation of my ideas. I'm actively thinking of how Western narrative assumptions shape climate storytelling pedagogy, and I'd find it useful to think that through with students and faculty rather than to deliver a formal talk. Saying that, I'm happy to bring materials from my Tisch workshop or my Sundance master class to share with colleagues interested in discussing climate storytelling more broadly. I have now spoken on this topic through site-specific workshops in New York and Los Angeles and at presentations to international filmmakers as part of the Torino Film Lab and the Venice Biennale and will be speaking at the Changing Climate, Changing Lives Film Festival in Bangkok in June 2026. Depending on what courses are being taught at the site in Fall 2026, I would welcome the opportunity to sit in on certain classes and/or present a guest lecture if faculty would find that useful.