The inaugural 2021 Line of Sight Panels will feature an intergenerational cast of speakers that highlight historical and contemporary Asian American engagement with mischief-making, political acuity, and solidarity as well as thinking broadly in a world-making capacity.
Facilitating public dialog about transgressive Asian American film history: its effects, its systems, and its legacies, the panels are intended to hold brave space for film and video makers, radical imagination, collective memory, and productive dissonance within Asian American media.
SPRING/SUMMER 2021 PANELS
▷ On Accents and Sonic Resonances, Wednesday, April 21, 7PM ET
Register HERE.
What are the radical potentials of sound? In what ways can sound shape imaginations in radical ways? Frequently, Asian American considerations of filmic soundscapes center around the voice, and thus accents and cadence, as markers of American assimilation. But from noise music to forensic audio documentaries, sound has a far more complicated potential to contain, expand, fossilize, and dislodge. The film scholar Pavitra Sundar and experimental music and film critic Joshua Minsoo Kim will expand beyond considerations of dialogue recording to speculate on what an oral and aural politics might sound and look like.
▷ A Time for Remembering, Friday, May 21, 4PM ET
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In our current drive for shifting centers of attention to BIPOC filmmakers and BIPOC-led spaces, certain ideas about diversity, form, and power are being upheld as new. This framing generates renewed interest in filmmaking practices, ethics, and aesthetics, but can often elide the many projects and makers who worked with, wrote about, and spoke out on these same ideas decades ago. Sometimes, for there to be progress, newer practitioners need to feel a break from the past. But other times, a casual forgetting is its own form of violence. For example, the publication of Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings led to younger Asian American critics, writers, and mediamakers discovering the “radical vision of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée,” as detailed by Mayukh Sen for The Nation. But not everyone has forgotten Dictée, nor was Cha the only Asian American writer and filmmaker from the '80s that pushed against form and incorporated the language of alienation. What other forms of Asian American experimentation should we be helping each other retrieve from our collective histories? How can these acts of remembrance help us form more sustainable structures?
Past and present Asian American film programmers, makers, and writers Daryl Chin, Meena Nanji, and Brian Hu will join us in a conversation moderated by Abby Sun.
*Co-presented with Kaya Press at the CAAM Filmmaker Summit
▷ Tailgating the Future, Wednesday, June 16, 7pm ET
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In the face of technological developments in expanded media, the recent popularity of Asian American science fiction, the abundance of historical and fantasy drama TV series available to stream, and the success of animated series and films drawing from Asian mythological traditions, the idea of visually accurate representations should be considered separately from potential commercial success. The popularity of these media productions exist simultaneously with the rise of cyberpunk and other bleak, techno-Orientalist futures. Do we have to avoid futurist visionings because the specter of yellow peril haunts Asian American film production? In this conversation, Alison Nguyen and Sue Ding will bring their experiences to speculate on the political implications of realism or naturalism as an aesthetic in Asian American independent films.
*Moderated by Devika Girish
*Co-presented with Chen's World