While the large scale, established film industries of East and South Asia have garnered much attention in recent years, relatively few scholars have tackled the question of cinema and regionality in SE Asian contexts. This paucity is due partly to the reluctance to consider SE Asia as a legitimate regional formation: historically an artifact of Western, Cold War imaginings, the idea of "Southeast Asia" has been seen as an imposition of imperial power, external to the region and removed from local realities. However, at the same time, nation-states have harnessed this regionality towards political, economic, and cultural ends, promoting pan-Asian affiliations alongside local specificity as a means of promoting diplomacy, tourism, and the arts (for example, through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations). The Southeast Asian Cinemas Research Network seeks to investigate and understand better the nature and complexity of this cultural flow both within Asia and across the globe by bringing academics and practitioners into dialogue. Recent years have seen a growth of independent cinema across SE Asia, with growing inter-regional and international film circulation supported by new production and distribution companies (e.g. Kick the Machine and Mosquito Films Distribution), leading to increased visibility at international film festivals. Yet this occurs against a backdrop of increasing political instability, divisions amongst social classes and between ethnicities, and increasing levels of media censorship. Investigating these issues through the theme of 'Space, Time and the Visceral', this new Southeast Asia-UK-USA network will examine the effects (on both the industry and the film texts themselves) of postcolonial nationalism and censorship on the one hand, and globalisation and transnational flows on the other. These themes will be addressed at an international conference at the University of Nottingham, Malaysia and at workshops and symposia at the University of Stirling, the Hanoi Center for the Moving Image (DocLab), at the University of California and the Glasgow Short Film Festival. In a context where constraints over freedom of speech often mean that academics, students and filmmakers working within the region are severely restricted over what can be discussed publicly, SEACRN will play an important role in ensuring that these discussions have an international platform and audience, bringing an overall coherence to a more disparate set of individual research projects. In order to do this, the network will work with partners within the Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas and will use the planned conference in Kuala Lumpur as a launch pad to begin a new, truly international research project that will bring together academics, filmmakers and students from the UK, Asia and North America to discuss these problems, and develop new areas of research that will be strategically important in the study of Southeast Asian Cinemas. In doing so, it will strengthen existing links and build new and lasting partnerships that reflect the international reach of the research in a way that existing networks based in the region (such as ASEAC) have not been in a position to achieve for economic, structural and institutional reasons. The network also seeks to further knowledge within the discipline of film studies by collaborating with individuals from other disciplines. For example, Abidin Kusno (Chair of Asian Urbanism and Culture, University of British Columbia) will be invited to be the keynote speaker for the conference in Malaysia at the beginning of the project, and sound ethnographer and Lecturer in Anthropology, Ernst Karel (Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab) will be invited to take part in a workshop at Hanoi DocLab. By incorporating perspectives from urban studies and anthropology, these discussions will help to push disciplinary boundaries that will help indentify new areas for research prioritisation.