Kass Banning and Warren Crichlow provide a historical and theoretical assessment of renowned British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien's ten-screen installation Lessons of the Hour: Frederick Douglass (2019). Lessons of the Hour is inspired by a combination of Douglass's own genre-breaking autobiographical writing, personal letters, and published lectures that mobilized tropes of visuality for his own unique rhetorical ends. With its sculptural multiscreen architecture, lush color palette, and immersive affordances and soundscape, Julien's Lessons is less concerned with rendering a hagiographic portrait of Douglass than in reactivating his visionary thought as a continued force for human rights in the twenty-first century. Lessons underscores that the nascent technology of photography and the renewed struggle for liberation from chattel slavery emerged simultaneously in the mid-nineteenth century; this confluence fosters Douglass's lifelong personal and theoretical inquiry into what both truth and sovereignty—and visuality—might entail.

The Portuguese documentary filmmaker Susana de Sousa Dias offers a comprehensive overview of her career over the past fifteen years, beginning with Natureza Morta ( Still Life , 2005) through her current project, Estação Total ( Total Station , working title). She explains that her films aim to reflect on authoritarian systems—especially the forty-eight year rule of Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar—and to shed light on the present through the materials of the past. In terms of her cinematic praxis, she discusses the vital importance of two techniques: “montage within the shot”—that is, a montage with visual, spatial, and temporal depth—and “decelerated movement,” which describes her approach to time and duration. Her most recent film, Fordlandia Malaise (2019), extends her work on repressive regimes to encompass current geopoliticals tructures with their underlying colonialist and imperialist heritage, whether derived from a European origin or from the ruth less capitalism of the New World.

This essay discusses the experimental nonfiction film El Mar La Mar (Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki, 2017), focusing on the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. El Mar La Mar is one of several recent films that use unconventional textual strategies to approach the subject of migration. Eschewing exposition altogether, it draws attention to the Sonoran Desert, a vast territory that in the last twenty-five years has become a deadly route for migrants trying to cross the border. Unlike what has often been argued about the film, though, El Mar La Mar does not produce an immersive viewing experience. Nor does it simply rely on observational strategies. Instead, it creates an uneasy sense of place out of unexpected juxtapositions of sound and image. Drawing on human geography and sound studies in documentary, this essay looks at how the film's textual strategies align place and politics in order to evoke the migrant crisis.

In 2013, the Walt Disney Company submitted an application to trademark “Día de los muertos” (Day of the Dead) as they prepared to launch a holiday themed movie. Almost immediately after this became public Disney faced such strong criticism and backlash they withdrew their petition. By October of 2017 Disney/Pixar released the animated film Coco . Audiences in Mexico and the U.S. praised it's accurate and authentic representation of the celebration of Day of the Dead. In this essay, I argue that despite its generic framing, Coco mobilizes many elements of horror in its account of Miguel's trespassing into the forbidden space of the dead and his transformation into a liminal figure, both dead and alive. Specifically, with its horror so deftly deployed through tropes and images of borders, whether between life and death or the United States and Mexico, Coco falls within a new genre, the border horror film.

Michael Boyce Gillespie leads a roundtable with scholars Jonathan W. Gray, Rebecca A. Wanzo, and Kristen Warner to discuss issues of medium, genre, fandom, and African American history in the highly regarded HBO series Watchmen . Characterizing the HBO series as a disobedient adaptation that modifies, extends, and redirects the world making of its source material—the famed twelve-issue comic-book series of the same name, written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons (1986–87)—Gillespie et al. explore the ways in which Watchmen remediates American history, starting with the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 that serves as the historical and ideological trigger that sets the series in motion. In a wide-ranging conversation that encompasses subjects including fan fiction, adaptation, cultural mythology, and black superheroes, the authors argue for Watchmen 's significance as some of the most consequential television of the century so far.

The release of Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzman's La Cordillera de los Sueños (Cordillera of Dreams) prompts FQ columnist Manuel Betancourt to reflect upon the reflexive turn in recent nonfiction documentaries from Latin America. Betancourt suggests that Guzmán pioneered the wave of documentary filmmakers in the region whose work marries first-person address with political urgency. Broadening his focus to include Petra Costa and Tatiana Huezo, whose films The Edge of Democracy and Tempestad explore the political collateral damage in Brazil and the violence against women in Mexico respectively, Betancourt argues that these filmmakers' embrace of self-reflexive strategies places them at the forefront of a vital nonfiction tradition that puts personal narratives front and center.

FQ columnist Bilal Qureshi reflects upon the significance of Bong Joon-ho's Parasite 's Oscar victory over the presumed favorite, Sam Mendes' World War I drama 1917 for both the film industry and the culture at large. In keeping with the premise of his column “Elsewhere,” which explores the ways in which cinematic works are activated and reframed by the national, cultural, and aesthetic geography of where they are experienced, Qureshi offers a fresh perspective on these two films based upon his experience of watching 1917 in Dubai, with Arabic subtitles and an ethnically diverse audience. Viewed in this Middle Eastern context, a film dismissed as passé and traditional by U.S. critics revealed itself as urgent and resonant, transcending differences of language and geography to offer a potent reminder of why the pain and loss of war still matters.

FQ's B. Ruby Rich files her annual report from Sundance, where the most powerful new dramatic films were by and about women. She singles out Kitty Green's The Assistant (2019) and Eliza Hittman's Never Rarely Sometimes Always for their meticulous attention to the hardly matter-of-fact rituals of life for two very different young women, as well as for a style that might be tagged “microrealism.” She also discusses Janicza Bravo's Zola and Pablo Larraín's Ema (2019), two very different enactments of female sexuality with varying degrees of agency. Praising the festival as the mothership of documentary, Rich recounts new favorites including Iryna Tsilyk's The Earth Is Blue as an Orange , Ramona S. Diaz's A Thousand Cuts , David France's Welcome to Chechnya , Hubert Sauper's Epicentro , Anabel Rodríguez Ríos's Once upon a Time in Venezuela , Kareem Tabsch and Cristina Costantini's Mucho Mucho Amor , Maite Alberdi Soto's The Mole Agent , Garrett Bradley's sobering Time , and Shalini Kantayya's chilling Coded Bias .

Thirty years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, are festivals like Sundance ready to move beyond basic access to embrace a new disability aesthetic? In search of an answer, Lawrence Carter-Long attends his first Sundance Film Festival, with a goal of assessing Sundance's commitment to disability access and inclusion beyond the branding and rhetoric. He reviews the Festival's disability-focused programming, participation, panels, and planning, much of which was supported by the Festival's new partnership with the Ruderman Family Foundation, whose philanthropy focuses on disability rights. Carter-Long discusses audience favorites Crip Camp and The Reason I Jump , both of which received audience awards, as well as the Festival's efforts to provide closed-captioning (CC) via individual CaptiView devices and Feature Film Captioning Service, concluding that the Festival set a new standard for disability inclusion and access.

Angela Aguayo reports on “We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media,” a touring retrospective of documentary media projects coprogrammed by Louis Massiah and Patricia R. Zimmermann, with archival assistance from the XFR Collective, and featuring forty projects produced by thirty-six nonprofit community organizations and cultural centers. “We Tell” dives into more than fifty years of media as developed by embattled communities with a shared political vision and a focus on advocacy and addressing problems more often excluded from larger public concern. In her review of the exhibition, Aguayo argues that participatory community media presents a critique of representational politics within the larger documentary field and offers a corrective to the tourism tendencies of contemporary documentary-production culture by foregrounding collaborative authorship and collective agency.

FQ Columnist Bilal Qureshi observes that while think pieces and popular culture alike depict heterosexual relationships as in crisis in the age of Tinder, gay love is blossoming in mainstream cinema, breaking out of its marginalized festival circuits to help redefine what it means to love and be loved in 2019. As his starting point, Qureshi discusses Lucio Castro's End of the Century (2019), a deeply personal film (for both the director and this critic) that Qureshi sees as emblematic of the ways in which a new generation of films have expanded the canon of gay romance. No longer burdened by tragedy and the fight for equal rights, films such as End of the Century, Moonlight , and Call Me By Your Name are free to focus instead on the universal mysteries of love, in ways that appeal to straight and queer audiences alike.

FQ columnist Manuel Betancourt chronicles an unprecedented and growing canon of narrative films from throughout Latin America that examine how twentieth- and twenty-first-century ideas of modernity impact the lives and languages of the indigenous characters placed front and center in these films. While nonfiction filmmaking has a long history of documenting indigeneity on-screen, including by indigenous filmmakers, in the world of narrative features, those who are framing and directing indigenous stories are still largely outsiders. Betancourt explores these issues of language and representation with regard to three recent films: Retablo (Álvaro Delgado Aparicio, 2019), Sueño en otro idioma ( I Dream in Another Language , Ernesto Contreras, 2017) and Wiñaypacha ( Eternity , Óscar Catacora, 2018).

Lucas Martinelli reports from the 34 th edition of Argentina's Mar del Plata International Film Festival, the only FIAPF-accredited film festival in Latin America. Noting that this year's festival marked the sophomore effort of Cecilia Barrionuevo, the first female director in the festival's history, Martinelli focuses attention on the notable uptick in discussion space and festival slots awarded to women in the industry. The festival's second Forum of Cinema and Gender Perspective brought female speakers from fields across the industry—actresses, directors, researchers, and journalists. In his discussion of films directed by women, Martinelli notes an interest in challenging the historical archive to create a new feminist historiography.

This roundtable grew out of conversations between filmmaker Rea Tajiri, programmer Abby Sun, and scholar Vince Schleitwiler about a misunderstood chapter in the history of Asian American film and media: New York City in the eighties, a vibrant capital of Asian American filmmaking with a distinctively experimental edge. To tell this story, Rea Tajiri contacted her artist contemporaries Shu Lea Cheang and Roddy Bogawa as well as writer and critic Daryl Chin. Daryl had been a fixture in New York City art circles since the sixties, his presence central to Asian American film from the beginning. The scope of this discussion extends loosely from the mid-seventies through the late nineties, with Tajiri, Abby Sun, and Vince Schleitwiler initiating topics, compiling responses, and finalizing its form as a collage-style conversation.

If what characterizes Asian American radical politics in 2020 is an articulation of the difference between, and interrelatedness of, the Asian diasporic elite and the migrant poor, the 2018 Asian American films Crazy Rich Asians and Searching achieved mainstream success by celebrating the emergence of the former. The media paratexts of Crazy Rich Asians used race-consciousness as putative resistance, engendering “messianic visibility”—an over-investment in cinematic identification as possessing transformative, even curative, political and personal potential for liberal cisheteronormativity. Meanwhile, Searching 's marketing as a film not about race was a significant talking point in the U.S. press. Its colormuteness functioned to normalize the entanglement of Asian diasporic elites in the ranks of Silicon Valley's digital empire. The films’ lack of friction in relation to surveillance capitalism and neoliberal empire ultimately highlights the contradictions of race and/as resistance in the present moment.

Vietnamese American filmmaking must be seen in the context of a community's diasporic formations. As such, it maps out a politics of representation that encapsulates the issues of community and history that invariably striate the ways in which Vietnamese American films and videos have been produced, distributed, received, and archived. This article focuses on the role of the Viet Film Fest, in Orange Country, California, as a major site for the archiving of South Vietnamese and Vietnamese American cinematic memory. In examining how this vital archive is shaped by both transnational politics and local practices of commemoration, Duong proposes its status as an archive of memory for a refugee community that wants to rectify how its members have been represented by U.S. and Vietnamese national cultures in film, both in the past and in the present moment.

This essay reflects on Spencer Nakasako's groundbreaking video work with Southeast Asian refugee youth and explores Nakasako's significant role in media histories not just in relation to Asian America, but to American media culture writ large. It pays particular attention to the role and rhetoric of the “amateur” in Nakasako's work, and the ways in which Nakasako transforms low-resolution, independent videomaking into an aesthetic as well as political force. Nakasako's “video diary” series, often called the refugee trilogy, emphasizes the significance of making film with and about community through both content and modes of production. Highlighting the ways in which gender comes into play in Nakasako's work, this essay focuses on Kelly Loves Tony (often the least discussed of the trilogy), and also includes material from recently conducted interview with Spencer Nakasako on the occasion of the 25 th anniversary of his trilogy.