Who We’re Watching: Sandi Tan

There’s a moment in the 2018 documentary Shirkers when narrator and filmmaker Sandi Tan says, “We were no longer magical kids who made a movie. We were just kids.” She’s referring to what happened after her friend and mentor, an American filmmaking instructor named Georges Cardona, disappeared in 1992, taking her movie with him. Tan, […]

Women to Watch: Stacey Aglok MacDonald

The logo for the television show Qanurli (What Now?)—which follows Inuk Qablunaaq (Thomas Anguti Johnston) as he lives off the land and hosts a TV show from a tent on the arctic tundra—features a high-top sneaker tied to a mukluk boot, hanging from a satellite. It’s a playful image, but one that also highlights the […]

Anna May Wong: Classic Starlet, Trailblazer, and Badass Risk Taker

In an opening scene of Shanghai Express (1932), a pinch-faced boarding house owner lectures two of her lodgers, a pair of courtesans named Hui Fei (Anna May Wong) and Shanghai Lily (Marlene Deitrich), about respectability. Appalled by Lily’s sauciness, the mistress of the house, Mrs. Haggarty (Louise Closer Hale), asks of Hui Fei: “I’m sure […]