Written By: Kano Umezaki Back in late June of 2021, I had the pleasure of speaking with documentary filmmaker and activist, Renee Tajima-Peña, about the PBS “Asian Americans” series, the origins of the Asian/American political film movement, and the s ...
Between the long and short
Forty minutes between life and death Written By: Demi Guo Content Warning: This article contains deep analyses and discussion of the nature and morality of suicide, which is the core theme of the film. The film starts with gunshots i ...
Composer Sherri Chung on her career and what working on ‘Kung Fu’ has meant to her
Written By: Jeremy Lim If you’ve seen a CW show from the past five or so years, there’s a good chance you’ve heard something composed by Sherri Chung. Chung has worked on a whole host of DC television adaptations, “Riverdale” and most recently, “Kung ...
Kayo Hatta’s ‘Picture Bride,’ a forgotten film ahead of its time
Written By: Nathan Liu “Between 1907 and 1924, more than 20,000 young Japanese, Okinawan and Korean women journeyed to Hawaii to become the wives of men they knew only through photographs and letters. They were called ‘picture brides.’ This film is ba ...
Ismail Merchant: Film producer poster child
Written By: Nathan Liu Producers. They’re crucial to filmmaking, yet few people seem to know what they actually do. I certainly didn’t. For years, if you’d asked me what I thought a producer was, I’d probably have said, “A fat, cigar-chomping man, ...
Portrait of a revolutionary heart: NoCut Film Collective’s ‘A Rifle and a Bag’
Written By: Kano Umezaki This article may contain spoilers. At night, around the time the moon’s gaze is at its highest, three people sit around a fire. “Today was supposed to be my funeral,” one man says. Laughter follows, alo ...
‘Dinner Party’ creates space for us to imagine a better future
Written By: Kyubin Kim This article may contain spoilers. Content warning: sexual assault. For many of us, the world we’re living in now is much different from the world we grew up in. As our knowledge of human experiences broa ...
Alex Liu searches for sex education and finds an opportunity for human connection in ‘A Sexplanation’
Written By: Aditya Sharma This article may contain spoilers. Growing up as a gay kid in the Bay Area, Alex Liu was fighting to understand his sexual identity. “Until I was 18 I was deathly afraid, so terrified of this part of m ...
Conversations with friends: ‘See You Then’ finds power in subtlety
Written By: Kyubin Kim This article may contain spoilers. Throughout the past few months, we've been slowly trickling out of isolation and into “hot vax summer,” and that also meant having awkward conversations with friends we ...