Chinese films in “the Chinese century” are more expansively confident than ever. A new vogue for science fiction, a genre that has taken off in China alongside the country's stratospheric growth, suggests that China is ready to take up the baton of galactic discovery adventure. Chris Berry examines the father-son narratives in The Wandering Earth (Frant Gwo, 2019) and Nova (Cao Fei, 2019), two recent films that link Chinese patriarchy to the triumph and trials of modern science and progress. The Wandering Earth reaffirms those dominant models in action adventure mode, while Nova' s melancholic wanderings are ambivalent and even mournful. Nova reveals a more complex and varied Chinese imagination regarding the challenges presented by the twenty-first century than a mainstream production like The Wandering Earth .

Asian Americans , a new five-part PBS series co-produced by Renee Tajima-Peña, Grace Lee, S. Leo Chiang, and Geeta Gandbhir has managed to do a rarity within the genre of Asian American film and video: addressing the need to make Asian Americans visible while simultaneously exploring deeper issues of race, racism, immigration, citizenship, and history that confront and engage the viewer in the ongoing need for social change. This series comes at an especially pertinent time when the seemingly arcane “yellow peril” racism of decades and centuries past has disturbingly resurfaced with the new COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrating that history can and does repeat itself. The series argues for the urgency in using media—in this case, television documentary—to condemn the violence that continues to plague not only Asian Americans, but others similarly implicated by virtue of their marginal status, including African Americans, the working poor, and immigrants.

On the occasion of the highly anticipated PBS/WETA documentary, Asian Americans , Denise Khor offers a comprehensive career overview of Renee Tajima-Peña, executive producer of the landmark series. Tajima-Peña is best known for her work as a director on films including Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1987, with Christine Choy) and My America… or Honk if you Love Buddha (1997), but her behind-the-scenes, institutional achievements are also significant. As the co-founder of NAATA/CAAM (Center for Asian American Media) and the first paid director of Asian CineVision, Tajima-Peña developed some of the most important organizational infrastructures to support independent Asian American filmmaking. Khor's interview with the filmmaker looks back at the radical history of independent filmmaking by Asian Americans and the sorts of filmmaking practices and collaborations shaping Tajima-Peña's past and present documentary work.

FQ board member and contributor Chris Berry translates a conversation between the independent female filmmakers Ai Xiaoming and Zeng Jinyan. Although of different generations, Xiaoming and Zeng are both outliers in China's male-dominated film industry. The most prominent women filmmaker among the first generation of independent documentarians, Ai Xiaoming has lived under virtual house arrest since Xi Jinping's rise to power in 2012. Zeng Jinyan came to public attention in 2006, when she documented the disappearance of her husband, civil rights activist Hu Jia, in a protest blog; she later completed a PhD on the work of Ai Xiaoming while in exile in Hong Kong. Both women have recently reentered public life, Ai Xiaoming writing about her experiences of the novel coronavirus lockdown in her hometown of Wuhan and Zeng releasing a new film, Hanjiao yu eryu ( Outcry and Whisper ), focusing on the special pressures placed on women who dare to speak out in public in China.

In the era of social distancing, when significant face-to-face and physical spaces—from film festivals to shelters—are not accessible, alternative viewing can act as community building for marginalized communities. Sex Education (Laurie Nunn, 2019–) and Trigonometry (Duncan Macmillan and Effie Woods, 2020–), both primarily queer positive and sex positive and featuring fully realized black, Asian, and mixed-race characters, indicate a new way of telling intimate stories in British television. Suggesting that these shows offer an exuberant poetics of sexual frankness that is as verbal and affective as it is visual and spectacular, So Mayer delineates their conscious invocation of queer and feminist cultural histories. And, at a time of heightened awareness about touch putting people at risk that could not have been a consideration at the time the shows were produced, Sex Education and Trigonometry use an educationally expansive narrative of sexualities in which an aesthetics of tactility is underpinned by new narrative forms shaped by consent and respect, to encourage viewers to welcome an equally expansive commonality.

Hollywood specializes in the humiliation of its female stars. But this “exposure” is paradoxically at the heart of the feminist aims of the #MeToo movement, too––women must confess moments of painful abuse in order to counter an oppressive patriarchal order. Systems of oppression are “conspiracies,” of sorts (which doesn't discount their validity: as the 1960s adage goes, “Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you”), and the Trump era is rife with conspiracy theories. But this “paranoid” view is not limited to either end of the political spectrum. Using the video work of former A-list Hollywood star, Sean Young (most famous as Rachael in the original Blade Runner [Dir. Ridley Scott, 1982]), which re-stages the moments of Young's greatest career humiliations, and Eve Sedgwick's ideas about “paranoid” and “reparative” reading strategies, this article considers the “reparative” potential of Young's work, and of humiliation in general.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, FQ columnist Caetlin Benson-Allott rejects streaming recommendations aimed at edification and instead embarks on her personal quest to find and understand the distinctive and therapeutic pleasures of cinematic escapism. Noting that escapism has been neglected by film theorists and critics—dismissed as an undignified, unsophisticated form of spectatorship—she suggests that this oversight explains her difficulty in identifying films that grant that particular kind of pleasure. An overview of her past and present cinematic guilty pleasures, from the B-grade horror movie Leprechaun (Mark Jones, 1993) to romantic comedies like Sleepless in Seattle (Nora Ephron, 1993), helps answer the question she poses: If I don't know how to articulate the value of escapism, how can I find it when I need it?

This article provides a feminist analysis of the HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood (dir. Alex Gibney, 2019) about Elizabeth Holmes and her failed biotech startup company Theranos, exploring the way that gender functions in terms of Holmes's appeal to the male journalists and investors who first supported the company as well as the way that gender functions in the film. This article also highlights a number of key aspects of the film including the parallel that Gibney makes between Holmes and Thomas Edison and the way that the Holmes/Theranos story provides an allegory for the Trump (“post-truth”) contemporary moment.

FQ columnist Bilal Qureshi reports from his first visit to the documentary film festival True/False in Columbia, Missouri. Overcoming his initial trepidation—both at the prospect of traveling just as the coronavirus was gathering steam and at the festival's regional location—Qureshi finds himself falling in love with film festivals all over again. Yet the contact high of the collective experience provided by the festival, with its freedom to collide with films and audiences through impromptu gatherings and celebrations, takes on a heightened poignancy in this moment of COVID-19. While noting the uncertainties of the new cinematic and social order that will emerge post-COVID, Qureshi hopes that the opportunity to press reset might result in more small-scale, community-focused festivals like True/False.

FQ contributing editor Nilo Couret uses the Fyre app, the Fyre Festival, and the dueling documentaries about Fyre— Fyre Fraud and Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened —to map the landscape of contemporary debt as it intersects with new media (i.e., mobile app development, social media advertising, and streaming platforms) and account for the theoretical and political implications of indebtedness. He concludes that streaming platforms are akin to social networks, video-sharing platforms, and online publishers both because of the relentless pursuit and monetization of our attention as well as an economic viability sustained by debt.

While Bong Joon-ho's Parasite is the most well-known recent example of the home-invasion thriller, Latin American cinema has produced a number of other films—many made before Bong's Oscar-winning film premiered at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival—using similar settings to create urgent stories about economic inequality. Emerging during a period of political and economic instability, these films present the luxury home as a stand in for an antiseptic capitalist order and a dulled bourgeois complacency, providing its occupants with a sense of safety and comfort that is as arbitrary as it is illusory. These films may focus on the rift between economic classes, but they are equally driven by a desire to unravel and dismantle the systems that put the working class at the mercy of moneyed homeowners. FQ columnist Manuel Betancourt examines these trends in relation to two recent films: Mexico's Mano de obra ( Workforce , 2019, dir. David Zonana) and Argentina's Marea alta ( High Tide , 2020, dir. Verónica Chen).

Rasha Salti surveys the changed landscape of film festivals forced to move online as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and questions what the future holds for an industry in which the opportunity for face-to-face contact serves as a raison d’être. Drawing upon her recent experience as a participant at the 2020 online editions of the documentary film festivals CPH: DOX, Visions du Réel, and Hot Docs, Salti assesses the pros and cons of their virtual format, from the reduced carbon footprint and absence of jet lag provided by virtual attendance to the loss of the special alchemy of in person meetings and the power of the “here and now.” Noting how film festivals are complicit in the collective destruction of the environment that the COVID-19 pandemic has made impossible to ignore, Salti urges a reconsideration of the paradigms that dictate how international coproduction film markets operate.

Noting that popular film and television have answered the Trump era's mass erosion of truth and justice with narratives about powerful deceivers and sophists, Film Quarterly Assistant Editor Marc Francis argues that no fiction has yet to offer as cohesive and relevant a response to these times as the what he terms the “bio-con” (biographical con) documentary. The bio-con documentary zeroes in on one notorious figure—a fraud—the unveiling of whose scheme occupies multiple national news cycles and is therefore ready-made for an extended investigation. Citing well-known examples such as Fyre Fraud (Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason, 2019), The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (Alex Gibney, 2019), Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes (Alexis Bloom, 2018), Where's My Roy Cohn? (Matt Tyrnauer, 2019), Francis probes these films for what insights they can offer about what is politically at stake in a postdemocracy United States and the connection between falsity and fascism.

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.