I had a horrendous opportunity to watch perhaps the most tiresome, offensive, boring film on queer issues and immigration anyone will ever make -- Maple Palm. The film is not even worthy of the B-Movie, Cult, Schlock, Ironic interest of hipsters and other pests. It is a pedantic, quasi-pornographic argument for gay marriage via immigration. Afterwards, one of my friends argued that the film demonstrated the cultural effects of oppression and lamented the way queer people have not produced a great body of cinema. Happily, I told her, this is simply not true. My top ten film list includes a number of films by queer folk. She retorted, "yeah, but they're probably all by white men." Again, happily for both of us, she was wrong. And so from that conversation, I produced the Q-MOC (Queer Movies of Color) list. This is a list of my favorite films made by queer people of color.
This is my list. Some are classic. Some are docs. Some are shorts. Some are experimental. Some have bigger budgets. Some don't. These are movies I think people should see for various reasons. I weighed in entertainment value, historical importance, diversity of theme, genre and style--as far as I know, all directors identify as queer and as people of color.
Amazing cinema made by queer people of color suffers from bad/underfunded distribution, an industry happy to minimize its public exposure, in some cases government harassment (Tongues Untied), and in others limitations of chosen genre (first person, experimental shorts like LEGACY, SURVIVING SABU, and EL DIABLO EN LA PIEL). Nonetheless, these films represent some of the most interesting trends in film and video in the last 30 years. Not all of these works are easy, none are hollywood fluff, most aren't even "indy" fluff.
Coming up with this list was tricky. I decided to omit many great films--I would be happy with a list dominated by Isaac Julien, Ximena Cuevas, or Gregg Araki because their works speak strongly to me. Avoiding repeating the same directors over and over, I made a rule of one-title per director.
I hope you like this list.
Happy viewing,
xo,
CPR
1) LOOKING FOR LANGSTON Isaac Julien
2) WATERMELON WOMAN Cheryl Dunye
3) MYSTERIOUS SKIN Gregg Araki
4) TONGUES UNTIED Marlon Riggs
5) HAPPY TOGETHER Wong Kar Wai
6) LOLLIPOP Kallup Linzy
7) EL DIABLO EN LA PIEL, Ximena Cuevas
8) SURVIVING SABU Ian Iqbal Rashid
9) DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST Julie Dash
10) LEGACY, Inge Blackman
At Free Speech TV, we started having monthly Doc Fridays. I get to pick a couple programs from our collection and show them to the staff. This past Friday, I showed Howard Scott Warshaw's Vice and Consent, which I've blogged about before, and Coco Fusco's Operation Atropos. The latter video is available through the Video Databank and will be playing on Free Speech TV. The first of the two films is an educational documentary about San Francisco's BDSM community. The second, Operation Atropos, is Fusco's exploration of women's roles in military interrogation after the photos from Abu Ghraib were released. Fusco takes a group of young women to an interrogation training course put on by ex-military interrogators. The bulk of the film shows her and the group of women experiencing interrogation and learning about it from the position of victims. The film addresses all sorts of issues about representation, the real, the performative, victimization, power, race, gender, etc...The conversation afterwards was quite interesting. One staff member was highly effected by the simulation of interrogation and found the documentary to be quite painful. Another, who had seen films from the School of the Americas in the late 80s, felt the film diminished the reality of torture. I really hope you get a chance to check it out when it plays on Free Speech TV. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
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