Italian and Greek with a foot in England, Alexandra is a visual anthropologist and a director. In the past few years she has been using documentary filmmaking, animation, theatre and storytelling as collaborative methods of research on the topics of migration.
In her social and cultural work on the ground, she applied similar creative methods in order to creat social contexts to foster new encounters and the sharing of stories, by co-founding in Milan the Fandema community theatre group, the Italian language school for newcomers Asnada, and the storytelling project on motherland MAdRI.
She has directed the trilogy of short docs “La Vita che non CIE” (2012), “It Was Tomorrow” (2018, 53mins) and co-directed “A Letter to Chinatown” (2025) merging together social research and collaborative documentary.
Teaches and researches Chinese and International Politics at the University of Manchester. Her research interests lie at the intersection of borders, gender, identity, migration, intimacy, and citizenship in the context of globalizing China. She experiments with post-positivist forms of inquiry, drawing on archival, genealogical, ethnographic, and collaborative audio-visual methods. Her filmmaking for research practice has resulted in the production of two collaborative feature documentary films: ‘British Born Chinese’ (2015, 47) and ‘A Letter to Chinatown’ (2025, 47min) and two shorts: ‘Border People‘(2018, 14min), and a ‘Group Wedding’ (2020, 5 min).
Is a documentary filmmaker at Kenawa Films. He is currently Lecturer in Film Practice at the University of Manchester. Kieran worked on ‘British Born Chinese’ from 2013 to 2015 and returned to reprise his role as sound recording and editor on ‘A Letter to Chinatown’ between 2023 and 2025.
Participated in the original “British Born Chinese’ documentary film in 2014 and we catch up with him 10 years later in “A Letter to Chinatown”. Since then, he has graduated from university with a politics degree and is now working at a tech start-up. We follow him in the slightly tumultuous transition as he enters adulthood in a new city while looking backwards at his family and past.
Is a poet and writer from London. He is the author of the essay Mixed-Race Superman (2018), and the poetry booksRENDANG (2020) and Brother Poem (2023).
He has won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
In 2024, he collaborated with Dan to support him in the writing of his poem ‘A Letter to Chinatown’ which is the closing note of the film.
Is a sound artist, composer and researcher from Sheffield, UK. His process for producing the score involved using recordings of Dan’s playing of traditional instruments and transforming them to form integral textural and melodic material for the film.
Is a Rome-based artist and experimental film director. His work has won awards such as the Nastro d’Argento and Best Short Film at the Turin Film Festival, and has been shown at festivals and museums including MAXXI, MOCA Hiroshima, and the Palais de Tokyo. He teaches at NABA in Rome.
Gianluca created the film’s animations starting from roots, both literal and symbolic, to build layered animated collages that explore the invisible ties we carry, no matter where we choose to live.
