Film: "Echoes of Home" (2024) (AsiaLENS Film Series)

• Event Date: Tuesday, November 11, 2025
• Time: 5:00 PM–6:30 PM (CST)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Age: All Ages
• Cost: Free

• Film
• Family-Friendly tag

AsiaLENS presents a free screening of the film Echoes of Home, featured at the 2025 AAS Film Expo. After the film, join us for a Q&A with the filmmaker Mirshad Ghalip.

Cosponsor: Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies

About the Film

This documentary explores the Uyghur American Cup, the largest event for Uyghur diaspora communities across the U.S. and Canada. The tournament uses soccer as a medium to foster community engagement and promote language maintenance. It also serves as a vital space for younger members of the diaspora, born or raised in North America, to connect with their heritage. (Directed and Produced by Mirshad Ghalip and David Tobin. 2024. USA. 43 minutes.)

About the Filmmaker

Mirshad Ghalip is a linguistic anthropologist whose research examines language, memory, and survival in the Uyghur diaspora. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Indiana University, where his dissertation, Uyghur Realities: Genocide in the Homeland, Survival in the Diaspora, combined autoethnographic, qualitative, and quantitative methods to analyze how state violence and displacement reshape language ideologies and cultural continuity among Uyghurs in North America. His work has appeared in Made in China Journal and other scholarly venues. He is also the director of Echoes of Home (2024), a documentary film exploring how Uyghur diasporic communities in North America cultivate belonging through collective rituals such as soccer.