Queer Filmmakers of Color 

Searching late one night, I was on cyber hunt for “Asian” and “lesbian”. I was led to a montage of images—writhing, flaunting, fucking—women erotic for the camera and the pleasure of men. I wondered. Are these representations of Asian lesbians the only ones out there? And who's creating them?

For award winning documentary filmmaker and educator Madeleine Lim, the visions of sexualized Asian women aren't just for the pleasure of the viewer. Still, she doesn’t dismiss the sex factor in her 1998 film Sambal Belacan in San Francisco. “This was a film about lesbians. . . How are you going to have a film about lesbians and not have something sexy and smoking in there?” shares Lim.

However with over fifteen years of film and video experience, films featured at international film festivals, universities, and broadcast on PBS, Lim sees the sex in her film as much more than just smoking. Along with teaching me some handy feminist film theory, she explains, “I knew that people, other than lesbians and lesbians of color would be watching it. The male person, through the gaze, is usually the one that is the norm, perceived to be absorbing and consuming these images. So I really wanted to challenge that.”

The wide reception and acclaim of Sambal in San Francisco led Lim to travel the festival circuit, sharing multiple themes of homophobia, racism, and community woven throughout her film. The experience was sullied, however, by a harsh realization: “I would go and meet other queer women of color directors, but there was only a handful of us, less than five of us who would hang out together.” Moreover, while gay and lesbian themed films such as Fire and The Hanging Garden were screened in Lim’s home country of Singapore, Samal Belacan in San Francisco was banned from the country and the censorship still hasn’t been lifted. For Lim, who is now based in the United States, it wasn’t only vital to create multifaceted images of queer women of color within the film medium but also to address the politics of who shoots from behind the camera.

“The question for me was where are we? Where are the queer women of color filmmakers?” Lim says. “Because if we are not filmmakers, then who is going to make films of our lives and us?”

Fast forward to the present, where Lim may have created her own answer: the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project (QWOCMAP). The program offers free video production workshops and the annual Queer Women of Color Film Festival.

This year’s a three day long extravaganza features thirty-five short films, four Q&A sessions with filmmakers, a panel discussion led by activist and writer Helen Zia, and a retrospective of internationally acclaimed British South Asian filmmaker Pratibha Parmar—all of which illustrates the tremendous growth of the queer women of color filmmaking community. “Last year, people came to every single screening; all the screenings sold out,” Lim says. “We turned away two hundred plus people.”

This year’s films range from the mixed genre experimental documentary Pieces of You to She Ejaculates, a narrative piece on female ejaculation. An array of experiences are portrayed from the perspectives of women who are Asian Pacific Islander, Black, Latina, and Native American, and those who are mixed race. Amber Fields’s short film jagadamba, mother of the universe, for example, explores her multiple identities. “It's about my healing journey through music, and my identity as a queer transnational adoptee,” she says.

What other film schools or community organizations cannot attest to is what happens when you put a camera in a queer girl of color’s hands. Jenesha "Jinky" de Rivera—whose work Labels Are Forever will screen at the festival—discovered that filmmaking was an opportunity to grow in ways not previously imagined. “One challenge I found came from being a woman of color who happens to be soft spoken and patient, not always the first attributes we think of when it comes to the ideal film director,” shares de Rivera. “I found that I was carrying both internal as well as external expectations to suddenly become a bossy and hotheaded director, two characteristics I don't think I will ever be on my own.”

Says Lim: “The film festival is really the opportunity to bring people together to look at art, to experience art, to talk about art and also, then our filmmakers become role models . . . for other people who are then inspired to make films about their experience.

“All our participants come in, most with no prior video production experience,” she adds. “It’s leadership development in making your film.”

First time filmmaker Vanessa Lewis was inspired to take the QWOCMAP free video production workshop after attending the festival previous years. Her short, Cause She Got It Like That, is a mixed media romantic comedy. She says of the festival, “It was the first time that I had ever seen women that actually looked like me, my family, my friends and lovers on screen in a positive, sexual, and humanistic light. I knew I had no alternative but to do everything possible to create a film and connect with the [QWOCMAP] community myself.”

For Pieces of You filmmaker K.V. Cao, working with Lim was life-changing. “Madeleine is tough. Intimidating and obviously passionately dedicated to her work. She expects a lot out of the participants including accountability to ourselves . . . but undoubtedly because she wants to see people push themselves and offer the best they can.” After finishing her project, Cao says, “I have a strong sense of accomplishment to feel like I finally finished and made a tangible product. It was an amazing experience.”

The Path to Filmmaking

Lim’s generosity and passion for activism stem from her childhood. She was born in Singapore and comes from a working class family. She attended an all-girls convent school and being a tomboy from early on, had a difficult time. Coming out was particularly traumatic. “I constantly got pulled out by the teachers,” she says. “I had an Irish nun who was my principle. I was constantly . . . interrogated and told how it was unnatural”

Growing up in the late 1970s and early ’80s, Lim found just as much discrimination outside of campus. “There was no information whatsoever,” she says. “No books. No Internet. No information about being gay . . . I had to figure things out for myself. Is it okay to desire another woman? Does this mean that I have to be a man? . . . How does this relate to religion? What about society? Do I have to change my body to conform to other people’s expectations? All these things I had to struggle with at fourteen, fifteen by myself . . .”

When she was eighteen she thought about going to college to study film, but she couldn’t afford it, so instead she started working and ran an underground lesbian feminist newsletter, which was illegal. At the time, the Singaporean government was arresting dissenters, and Lim was vulnerable because she was trying to organize a lesbian community.

“It was always this huge desire for community, wanting to be in community, wanting to build community, wanting to be apart of community, because it just felt so isolating and alienating for me,” she explains. “That was the reason I started that lesbian feminist newsletter . . . The need for community was much larger than the fear of being arrested.”

Eventually, she left the country and moved to the United States, where she began nurturing her interests in film.

“I started to take night classes at City College of San Francisco and cable access. . . . the cable company in San Francisco, they have to provide training. Basically any layperson off the street can . . .  come in, and say hey I want to learn about your equipment and they are obligated to teach.”

For four years Lim worked on and off as a crew member for independent producers. She also took night classes. Then she decided it was time to take her craft more seriously. “It wasn’t until I finally turned thirty. I said, Okay, I don’t know if I am any good still, and there is no way to tell, and the only way I can figure out if I am any good is to enroll full time at the film program.” She went to San Francisco State University, where it she received the training and opportunity to create her award wining documentary film Sambal in San Francisco, centered on the lives of three Singaporean lesbians creating home in the United States.

Through many pivotal scenes, Lim challenges the stereotypical images of Asian lesbians. In one provocative sequence, Lim takes sexy back: The camera slowly follows along the bodies of two women in bed. The women's faces are revealed. Suddenly they look directly into the camera. When watching the film, the viewer feels startled and implicated: "It's not like a hey dude, come join us look. It's more like this is who we are; we are going to be in your face," explains Lim.

Lim also challenges stereotypical representations through the her work at Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project, which she founded in 2000. Early on when the QWOC film festival was getting off the ground, Lim had a particularly disturbing encounter, which now serves to reinforce her commitment to social justice activism. During a screening of Latina films, an in-house armed security guard lost control, she recalls. He interrupted her during her introductory remarks, refused to let some people enter the room,  and yelled at some women.

“Not only was it queer women of color,  they were primarily Spanish speaking, and I think it triggered something in him,” she says. Later the security guard admitted that he was uncomfortable in the company of the women and got upset because “they” were “activists,” Lim says.

Directions for QWOC Filmmakers

While QWOCMAP has served various communities such as queer trans men and youth, the organization continues to focus on queer women of color, a group, she says, “that still receives, out of the L and the G and the B and the Q . . . the least amount of support and funding. . . That’s why we are focused on queer women of color, particularly low income and immigrant queer women of color.”

As a student in the QWOCMAP workshop, I am among those who benefited from Lim’s knowledge. I remember in the beginning freaking out not knowing even how to turn on the camera, much less attempt to make a film. Like many others who have been through the workshop, I not only became a filmmaker, I became more confident as an artist. My short documentary film All of Me profiles the first Asian Pacific Islander drag king troupe in the Bay Area. It will be shown at this year’s festival.

Lim tells me that she recalls the time “we talked about how . . . to do anything well you have to practice. You have to be given the opportunity to practice something. How many times are we given the opportunity to practice our filmmaking?”

QWOCMAP’s future projects include developing a distribution program and Lim’s personal documentary on adoption. Lim maintains that the creation, the activism, and the education are all part of the same vision. “This is the journey we are all going on. As long as you can commit the time, and you can commit the energy to do it, you can do it. It evolves over time. When I first started it, the vision was to create a really vibrant queer women filmmaking community.”

I ask her if that vision has been realized.

She answers with one simple word, “Definitely.”

And then I understand. Thanks to her years of hard work, I am part of her community, one piece of her vision.

Margaret Rhee has written academic articles on representation, race, and sexuality for Amerasia Journal; the anthology Crash Course: Reflections on the Film 'Crash' for Critical Dialogues About Race, Power and Privilege; and the Sexuality Research and Social Policy. She has done research with the Jailed Women and HIV Education project at the Center for Research on Gender and Sexuality, and previously, worked as a writer and editor for YOLK Magazine, ChopBlock.com, and Back Stage. She is an incoming doctoral student at University of California, Berkeley in ethnic studies. She is also an emerging documentary filmmaker, poet(ess) and family man.

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The 4th Annual Queer Women of Color Film Festival. June 13-15, Brava Theatre, 2789 24th Street, San Francisco.