Beyond Borders Jan 2012 :: Kimiko Suda
31 December 2011
Tania De Rozario
Welcome to the second edition of Beyond Borders! We hope everyone has had a great start to the 2012!
Kicking off this new year, we are excited to have with us Kimiko Suda, co-director of the Asian Film Festival Berlin , a bi-annual festival originally run by five women, that stemmed from a growing interest in diaspora, gender, and a need to platform critically and creatively groundbreaking film. Since then, the team has expanded and we get in on the action with some questions for Suda, who was kind enough to oblige us with her time.....
(All festival pics are taken by Dong-Ha Choe)
Name, Age, Occupation, Location.
Kimiko Suda, 32, co-director of the Asian Film Festival Berlin, researcher and lecturer at the Free University of Berlin.
Tell us a little about the most recent installment of the festival.
This year’s festival theme was Imagine(d) Kinships, embracing debates about globalization, social transformation and the shifting of idea(l)s of nationality, kinship and gender roles. The festival program included 35 short, documentary and fiction films from East Asia (Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan), Southeast Asia (Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam) and the Asian Diaspora (USA, Canada, Australia). We wanted to invite Ann Hui, since we screened her queer comedy “All About Love”, but unfortunately she had to work on her new project and couldn’t make it. But we had other guests from Japan, Vietnam, Thailand and Hong Kong. More than 1000 visitors came to the screenings at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Korean Culture Centre Berlin. The youngest and most lively audience received the screening of Saigon Electric (USA/Vietnam 2011), which features street dance as well as the notion of community and friendship as kinship. Vietnamese-German teenage girls in mini-skirts laughing, shouting and clapping along with the story were fun to watch.
(Above: Festival co-director Sun-ju choi with legal advisor and organizational coordinator Jee-un kim)
That is really, really cool. Did you have any fringe events to compliment the screenings – feels like there was a lot of opportunity to run satellite events!
Since we define the festival as a platform and network for film directors, festival organizers and also film scholars, we include a film lecture and discussion in each festival edition. This year the theme was “Gender and Kinship in Hong Kong Independent Cinema,” Yau Ching (director and film scholar, Lingnan University Hong Kong) and Denise Tse-Shang Tang (film scholar and sociologist, University of Hong Kong) presented a comparison of different Hong Kong lesbian video artists and a personal reflection about being a female film maker.
That is really awesome. We love projects that deal with issues of gender in critical ways. Oh and speaking of gender, maybe you could let us know how this festival evolved from the Asian Berlin Women’s Film Festival.
Basically we just wanted to have a broader choice of Asian films to be shown and we had one man (female-to-male transgender) joining our team, so we changed our name from Asian Women’s Film Festival to Asian Film Festival Berlin.
Through our growing interest in Asian Diaspora films we learned, that in the US most of the bigger cities each have an Asian Film Festival run by Asian Americans, so in some ways we took them as our role model. In Europe there is only one other film festival run by Asian women, its CinemAsia in Amsterdam. Usually film festivals, also the one including many Asian films, in Europe are predominantly run by “white guys”. We all love films but were not interested going through many years of being an assistant of a white guy in charge of the Asian film section in the festivals here in Europe, so we rather run our own festival even if we don’t earn anything with it for the moment, just the festival production costs are covered.
I totally agree with that philosophy. If you are sick of not getting an adequate platforms from which to showcase quality work, set up your own. The six of you seem like quite a power-packed team. How did you all come together?
In 2005 I met Sun-ju Choi when editing a film catalogue together. She and a group of older Korean women founded the Asian Women’s Film Festival Berlin in 2007. The older Korean women knew each other through a network of Korean-German nurses who all came to Germany for work in the late 1960s and belonged to the first group of immigrants successfully fighting in public for their right to get long term residency in Germany. When she asked me to help out with the Chinese film section I was happy to join. In 2011 we basically started to share the burden of main responsibilities such as fundraising, so we see it as a co-directorship now.
Jee-Un Kim our orga
nizational coordinator and legal advisor is a lawyer specialized in media in her day-job, but as a board member of korientation, the registered association which hosts our festival, she has been organizing other big cultural events with Sun-ju before.
Feng-mei, Rei and I already met as students around 2003, we became close friends and Feng-mei joined the film festival in 2009 and Rei in 2011. Arnika is the only non-Asian curator, but she spent ten years in Bangkok, is fluent in Thai and somehow considers Thailand her home since most of her closest friends live in Bangkok. We met her through friends in Berlin in 2008, now she works in Hong Kong, but since I also travel through Hong Kong a few times per year for work, we meet regularly to eat, chat and discuss the festival issues.
Feng-mei moved to Los Angeles for studies and work, but somehow we developed a regular communication structure including e-mail and Skype, so we work pretty well as a transnational team.
Most of us work as research associates and lecturers, so we partly have the same troubles in daily life and find it easy to relate to each other. Besides the festival work we sometimes also organize conference panels, write articles or go on holidays together. In Germany there aren’t that many “People of Color” working in universities yet, so it’s good to build a network for personal support….I guess its close personal friendship and shared professional interests, which connects our group of friends.
Wow. It seems like a lot of your dynamic is rooted in the fact that you are such a transnational team. Given the international make-up and the range of life experiences, does the team ever have any disagreements about what constitutes Asian-ness? What do you and your team define as being and Asian film?
Geographically we include East Asia and South East Asia and the related Asian Diaspora. Maybe we could say we are mainly interested in perspectives through an “Asian (Diasporic) Eye”, rather than films done by random film directors on the topic “Asia”. Theoretically we try to think beyond those categories though, always keeping in mind, that nations are “imagined communities” as Benedict Anderson states, that Gender and Ethnic identities are constructed and constantly in a flow of transformation…
A team of media activists from Thailand together with Hong Kong-based AFFB curator Arnika Fuhrmann.
Then fluid nature of gender and ethnic identities does tend to make categorization difficult on occasion. Do you feel though that certain elements of race, nationality and gender impact the filmmaking process?
If we look at the film industries, film festivals, the power relations regarding the three categories mentioned in your question, Asian women are definitely still hardly represented in decision making positions and do not easily get funding for big film projects. So we think it is important to support especially female filmmakers with showing their films and invite them to come to Berlin. Of course there are some quite powerful female producers/film directors within Asian countries, e.g. the late Yasmin Ahmad or Ann Hui to name two examples.
Besides the film making the reception of a film can also clearly be influenced by gender. We had an interesting experience this year, when we screened our opening film “Bi dung so!”. Some “feminists” of the older generation, in the end of their 50ties, complained, that the film was “not empowering women”.
We liked the film because it opens up different possibilities to read the narrative, we e.g. saw the desire of a young woman in a summer night, a gay man’s longing gaze, etc., but the older women saw naked bodies and thought it sexist. So we thought we indeed should remember, that actually one situation or image can be seen very differently by each person or sometimes different generations even if having the same gender, one person feels empowered, another one intimidated or even disgusted.
That is very interesting. I mean, given how film provides for such a wide range of multiple entries, is there any ideology that underscores the films selected for your festival?
I wouldn’t think so. We just prefer films offering critical and innovative perspectives, questioning power relations and clichés and which show perspectives missing or hardly being represented in the mainstream film and media landscape.
For example what we get to see in German TV-series are Asian-German actresses playing sex workers, passive, smiling waiting to be seduced by “white men”, we don’t get to see any Asian news announcer or “daily life”-characters such as accountants, lawyers, teachers, etc.. Regarding the representation of ethnic minorities in the media Germany is lagging far behind the visual culture in Anglo-American countries.
As mentioned before, most of us work in universities besides being involved with the festival, so we are definitely influenced by certain theoretical perspectives, e.g. postcolonial and feminist/queer theory, but of course we also relate to our personal, family’s and friends’ experiences e.g. regarding migration, when we select the films.
And we see film as visual art, so we also look for a beautiful cinematic language in the films, not only content. Sometimes if we receive a film with a great topic, but shot and edited in a not so professional way, we show it in a different context on a smaller screen, invite the director and go for an in-depth discussion about the theme dealt within the film.
Who are some of your favourite filmmakers?
Ann Hui, Angelina Maccarone, Renee Tajima-Pe_a, Yang Yong-Hi, Cohen Brothers, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Hong Sang-soo, Fatih Akin. I also love Classics e.g. by the Korean director Sang-Ok Shin.
Lovely. And how would you sum up your personal feminism/s into three sentences?
Never loose your curiosity and humor.Only if you are economically independent can you choose a life and a partner that you truly want. And don’t be Hello Kitty: open your mouth and talk back if something or someone bothers you.
Filed under Spotlights | Beyond Borders | Interviews | January 2012
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