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.

Oliver Wang interviews documentary filmmaker Arthur Dong. Originally from San Francisco, Dong began his career as a student filmmaker in the 1970s before releasing the Oscar-nominated short film, Sewing Woman in 1982. Since then, his films have focused on the role of Chinese and Asian Americans in entertainment industries as well as on anti-LGBQ discrimination. In the interview, Wang and Dong discuss Dong's beginnings as a high school filmmaker, his decision to turn the story of his seamstress mother into Sewing Woman , his struggle to bring together the Asian American and queer film communities and his recent experience in staging a “Hollywood Chinese” exhibit inside a renovated bar in West Hollywood.

Of the group of filmmakers of color who arrived at UCLA in the late 60s and 70s, as part of an affirmative action initiative called the Ethno-Communications Program, a growing body of award-winning scholarship has been devoted to the black filmmakers now known as the L.A. Rebellion. There is also an important body of work on the Asian American men who founded the nation's oldest and still vibrant Asian American media organization, Visual Communications (VC). This essay aims to expand this scholarship by centering the contributions of the group of Asian American women who trained at UCLA film school during this period, highlighting in particular the activist work of Betty Chen and Laura Ho.

Marina Razbezhkina is a well-known Russian documentary filmmaker, educator, and founder of the largest independent documentary school in the country. Her very original approach to documentary, which combines intimate proximity to the protagonist with raw observational aesthetics, revolutionized the Russian film landscape and became the trademark of her school. Her students most often work as a one-person crew with a lightweight hand-held camera shadowing their protagonists up close. This “hunt for reality,” as Razbezhkina terms the practice, usually results in deeply engaging observational documentaries that completely absorb the viewer into an unfamiliar reality. In this interview Razbezhkina talks about the beginnings of her career, explains the origins and the core of her filmmaking method, and discusses the changing role of documentary in the modern world.

Joanna Hogg's cinema is characterized by its formal precision and its unflinching take on upper-middle class privilege, especially in the context of the family. Her first two feature films— Unrelated (2007) and Archipelago (2010)—scrutinize the dynamics of unhappy families on vacation. Exhibition (2015) takes a long hard look at a couple, both of whom are artists, as they go about their everyday lives in their modernist London home. All of these films avail themselves of rigorous framing and frequent long-take cinematography in order to make cinematic space itself a vehicle of emotional and political analysis. Her most recent feature, The Souvenir (2019), converts elements of Hogg's own biography to tell the story of a young filmmaker who learns the hard way that filmmaking and romantic love are the most difficult enterprises.