Documentary Disclosures: The Emergence of Queer Independent Filmmaking in India

“Documentary Disclosures” is about the emergence of queer-identified filmmaking in India against the dramatic backdrop of a rapidly transforming mediascape in the last decade of the twentieth century. The restructuring of India’s urban mediascape in the 1990s—through processes of economic globalization, an open-sky policy, and the rise of the Hindu right—witnessed wide-ranging cultural transformations, including an unprecedented efflorescence of cinematic and televisual speech on issues of sex and sexuality. Against this backdrop, the works of three independent filmmakers—Pratibha Parmar, Riyad Wadia, and Nishit Saran—rendered queer subjects and communities visible while raising formalist concerns about documentary’s ability to “disclose.” This chapter discusses the work of these filmmakers as both intercultural texts and confessionals that shaped a new generation of queer interlocutors.

Who counts? The presence of women directors in Spanish independent cinema through a data analysis of film circulation (2013-2018)

This article examines the presence of women filmmakers in Spanish independent cinema by assessing the national circulation of their works in the alternative distribution and exhibition circuit where gender studies are almost inexistent. Along with other neighboring countries, independent filmmaking enjoys a growing cultural weight within a national cinema conditioned by digitalization and the domination of multinational corporations in the aftershock of the economic crisis. The study, based on a representative sample to quantify female directors, carries out a cross-sectional examination in three areas within independent film circulation that, in turn, endow them with such status: festivals, specialized VOD platforms and independent film distribution companies with catalogs for release in traditional movie theaters or the cultural sector. The chosen timeframe is 2013-2018, from the moment independent cinema, branded as other cinema, achieves increased visibility, and establishes itself as an alternative to the commercial cinema in Spain up to the most recent year with available data. The research shows that, although there is a more significant proportion of female filmmakers than in commercial production, it continues to be a minority in the 20% range. Such underrepresentation does not only affect the cultural value of women’s work but also raises questions on the nature of a type of independent film practices that lay claim to cultural diversity.

History before and behind the Camera: An Interview with Renee Tajima-Peña

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.

Refugees on film

The article considers one dominant tendency of independent filmmaking, and its impact on the treatment of the refugee (broadly conceived): the application of contemporary documentary methods to both fiction and nonfiction works. The goal is a preliminary exploration of the complex, context-sensitive political effects of the approach, sometimes dubbed the “documentary style”, as resistance of (and/or submission to) the hegemonic global-nationalist order. To this end, the paper investigates specifically how such filmmaking efforts may—or may not—redirect the phenomenological vehicle of imagination away from narrow nationalist imaginaries towards a broader humanist identification and emotional (and normative) investment in the stranger or “the other” per se. The focus is on two works in particular, Another News Story (Orban Wallace, 2017) and Before Summer Ends (Avant la fin de l’été, Maryam Goormaghtigh, 2017), identifying how the filmmakers’ broadly pluralistic techniques help avoid the potentially dehumanising pitfalls of more didactic approaches, but also generate their own potential limitations. While the slackening of the subject’s categorical—and the plot’s narrative—shape may be liberating, it also risks a phenomenological disconnection on the part of the potentially interested spectator. The cognitive effects—including impediments to memory and recall—may thus weaken the work’s potential as a vehicle of cultural awareness and social identification.