While recent years have marked a breakthrough in Asian American representation in mainstream cinema, there exists a vibrant counter-history of boundary-pushing independent and experimental filmmaking by Asian American artists that remains largely overlooked. Revisiting the wide-ranging film and video work produced by Asian American filmmakers in the 1990s, My Sight Is Lined with Visions spotlights iconoclastic voices whose work challenges both stylistic conventions and traditional modes of representation, including Trinh T. Minh-ha, whose 1989 feature SURNAME VIET GIVEN NAME NAM heralded a decade of formally ambitious filmmaking to come; Rea Tajiri (STRAWBERRY FIELDS), whose work confronts the scars of Japanese American interment; Spencer Nakasako (KELLY LOVES TONY), who pioneered a form of collaborative documentary filmmaking that gives young people the lens to tell their own stories; and Justin Lin and Quentin Lee, whose outré SHOPPING FOR FANGS deserves to takes its place as a queer cult classic. This collection is curated by Abby Sun and Keisha Knight, and is an expansion of their online screening and discussion series, which ran from January 2021–January 2022.
Directed by Trinh T. Minh-ha • 1989 • United States, Vietnam
Vietnamese-born Trinh T. Minh-ha’s profoundly personal documentary explores the role of Vietnamese women historically and in contemporary society. Using dance, printed texts, folk poetry, and the words and experiences of Vietnamese wom...
Directed by Gregg Araki • 1992 • United States
Starring Mike Dytri, Craig Gilmore
A gay THELMA & LOUISE for the New Queer Cinema movement, Gregg Araki’s couple-on-the-run romance follows two HIV-positive lovers—hustler Luke (Mike Dytri) and film critic Jon (Craig Gilmore)—who, with nothing left ...
Directed by Roddy Bogawa • 1992 • United States
Japanese American filmmaker Roddy Bogawa explores the complexities of multicultural identity through the story of Ben, young American-born man whose father was part of a bombing mission that destroyed his Japanese mother’s village and killed her en...
Directed by Jon Moritsugu • 1993 • United States
Starring Jon Moritsugu, Amy Davis, Jenny Woo
Shot in eyeball-scorching Panavision, TERMINAL USA is underground anarcho-punk auteur Jon Moritsugu’s freak-out magnum opus that shocked America—and prompted a conservative outcry against public funding...
Directed by Shu Lea Cheang • 1994 • United States
Starring Sarita Choudhury, Erin McMurtry, Abraham Lim
Taiwanese-born new-media visionary Shu Lea Cheang directs this avant-anarcho ecosatire, in which a lesbian couple living on Staten Island find themselves ensnared in a vast conspiracy involvin...
Directed by Marlon Fuentes • 1995 • United States, Philippines
Starring Marlon Fuentes, Jordan Porter, Nicole Antonio
In this poignant experimental docudrama, director Marlon Fuentes explores deeply personal questions of Filipino American identity via an eye-opening account of the 1904 St. Louis...
Directed by Kayo Hatta • 1995 • Japan, United States
Starring Youki Kudoh, Akira Takayama, Tamlyn Tomita
Director Kayo Hatta drew upon the experiences of her own grandmothers to tell this heartfelt immigrant story. In 1918, sixteen-year-old Riyo (Yuki Kudo) travels from Japan to Hawaii to marry ...
Directed by Quentin Lee and Justin Lin • 1997 • United States
Starring John Cho, Jeanne Chinn, Radmar Agana Jao
This deliriously entertaining, ultra-low-budget cult favorite marked the directorial debut of future blockbuster helmer Justin Lin, who codirected along with his UCLA classmate Quentin...
Directed by Rea Tajiri • 1997 • United States
Starring Suzy Nakamura, James Sie, Reiko Mathieu
Amid the political turbulence and heady counterculture of early 1970s, Vietnam-era America, Irene (Suzy Nakamura), a rebellious sixteen-year-old Japanese American girl, leaves home and takes off on a r...
Directed by Spencer Nakasako • 1998 • United States
Starring Tony Saelio, Kelly Saeteum
For this remarkably raw, candid video diary, documentarian Spencer Nakasako gave a camcorder to a young Laotian American couple living in the Bay Area. Over the course of eighteen months, Kelly, a promising h...
Directed by Helen Lee • 1990 • Canada
Starring Sally Lee
A large black mole above an Asian woman’s breast serves as a metaphor for cultural and racial difference in this engaging experimental film, a provocative and stylish meditation on Asian femininity. Offscreen women’s voices and scenes from...
Directed by Kip Fulbeck • 1991 • United States
Starring Kip Fulbeck
Kip Fulbeck’s landmark video work on Hapa identity is a raw, funny, fearlessly honest account of growing up biracial.
Directed by Rea Tajiri • 1991 • United States
Filmmaker Rea Tajiri’s family was among the 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in internment camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Drawing from a variety of sources—Hollywood spectacle, government propaganda, newsreels, mem...
Directed by Meena Nanji • 1992 • United States
Meena Nanji’s poetic video work explores the psychological and social constraints experienced by some women growing up under orthodox Islamic law.
Directed by Laurie Wen • 1994 • United States
Filmmaker Laurie Wen examines how Chinese immigrants live at the complex crossroads of food, language, colonization, and immigration by approaching a series of strangers—all immigrant women—in a Chinatown grocery store and then following them home fo...
Directed by Patty Chang • 1998 • United States
In this piece inspired by her aunt’s death from breast cancer, performance artist Patty Chang juggles a narrative about an imaginary cultural ritual with the act of cutting and eating a melon while balancing a plate on her head.
Directed by Richard Fung • 2000 • Canada
SEA IN THE BLOOD is video artist Richard Fung’s personal documentary about living with illness, tracing the filmmaker’s relationship to both AIDS and the blood disorder thalassemia, which afflicted his partner and sister respectively.
