by Latoya Peterson, originally published at Jezebel

From the age of twelve to the age of seventeen, Davina Wan was in a gang. Excuse My Gangsta Ways reflects on a life in which a young girl could attend 35 funerals before the age of eighteen.
Directed and produced by Corinne Manabat, Gangsta Ways shares the powerful story [...]

by Guest Contributor Angry Asian Man, originally published at Angry Asian Man

Aoki, by Ben Wang and Mike Cheng, is a new feature documentary chronicling the life of the late Richard Aoki, a third generation Japanese American who became one of the founding members of the Black Panther Party in 1966. Here’s the film’s official description:
[...]

by Latoya Peterson
Wesley Du, creator of the film I wrote about here, has agreed to host to the film on YouTube so that everyone can have a chance to see it. (Thanks Wes!)
Here is the film, parts one and two.

As you formulate your responses, I’d like you to keep a couple things in mind:
1. [...]

By Special Correspondent Arturo R. García

These notes are taken from complimentary screenings courtesy of the San Diego Asian Film Festival, which concluded Thursday night.
For those of us who only remember Jack Soo from watching Barney Miller with our parents, the documentary You Don’t Know Jack is aptly named, as it reveals a pleasant set of [...]

by Latoya Peterson
One of the reasons I enjoy shorts programs is the sheer variety of content that you see.  After eyeing the selections at the DC APA Film Fest this year, I decided to head over to check out the “You Thought You Had It Tough” series.  While I had originally gone for Excuse My [...]

by Guest Contributor J Chang, originally published at INIT_Moving Pictures
I think I overestimated my capacity for brevity and so what was supposed to be a three part series will probably end up spreading out further as I try to unpack and look into the long relationship between race and cinema.
Last time, I established the tension [...]

by Guest Contributor (and frequent commenter) J Chang, originally published at Init_MovingPictures

Ever since news of The Last Airbender’s casting broke, there’s been a lot of commotion in the Asian American community about casting and how it seems that Asians are losing to white people in playing Asian characters. Now, there are issues present in the [...]

by Latoya Peterson

Riding back from a family reunion in South Carolina, we were all bored and half-listening to the news when the latest Marion Barry scandal broke. Marion Barry had been accused of stalking his ex-girlfriend. All the adults in the car listened intently to the newscast, then started to laugh uncontrollably.
“That damn Marion Barry,” [...]

by Guest Contributor Melissa Silverstein, originally published at Women and Hollywood
Interesting story out of England about how director Anthony Fabian is resorting to guerrilla type outreach tactics to raise awareness and get an audience to see his new film Skin starring Oscar nominated actress Sophie Okonedo. The film premiered at Toronto last year and [...]

by Guest Contributor Rebecca Linz

I was looking forward to “The Soloist” for two reasons: having played the violin all my life, I love those rare contemporary films that dare to explicitly appreciate classical music, but also because I am a sucker for based-on-a-true-story films.
The dynamic between the two protagonists (Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Ayers, a [...]

by Guest Contributor Akshay, originally published at b-listed

Shmuel Beru arrived in Israel at age 8 with the first wave of Ethiopian immigrants in 1984. Classmates, who’d never seen a black person before, rubbed his skin to see if the color would come off. Growing up, they called him the “chocolate boy” and worse.
Today the actor-writer [...]

By Guest Contributor Fiqah, originally published at Possum Stew

A couple of weeks back,  AJ Plaid and I collaborated on a humor piece  for Racialicious about White guys who had received the Black Folk Stamp of Approval for Screen Time with Sistahs™.  It was a mostly tongue-in-cheek piece that was surprisingly popular (if the number of comments [...]

By Special Correspondent Arturo R. García
To horribly mangle The Beatles’ words, picture yourself in this hallway, on a hot July day – surrounded by more than 150,000 male and female geeks in all assortment of accoutrements. Welcome to my weekend in the world’s biggest Jiffy-Pop. If you were only able to score tix for one [...]

By Sexual Correspondent Andrea (AJ) Plaid and Guest Contributor Fiqah
Fiqah:All right, full disclosure. I loathe Birth of a Nation. L-O-A-T-H-E, my friends. In my short time on this planet, I have been forced to endure two (!) viewings of the flick–twice the Recommended Lifetime Limit for Black people. The last time I watched this film [...]

by Latoya Peterson

Hello All!
I was tipped by Chrissy of the B-listed blog that DJ Spooky is at the Museum of Modern Art remixing the classic propaganda film The Birth of a Nation.
We interviewed performance artist and writer, DJ Spooky: That Subliminal Kid, on his latest project starting on Monday at MoMA here in NYC, where [...]