CAAM FILMMAKER SUMMIT & LINE OF SIGHT PRESENT A TIME FOR REMEMBERING

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 by Kaya Press, this Line of Sight panel is supported by CAAM and is a program of Sentient.Art.Film.