Season 7, Ep. 1: Mississippi Triangle

Welcome back to Saturday School! This is our 7th season, and this semester, we'll be exploring Asian American interracial cinema. When we signed off last season, coronavirus had just taken hold and the nation had erupted with protests for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Black Lives Matter.

As racial tensions escalated, it had many Asian Americans grappling with questions like: What is our place in this? How can we help? How are we complicit? What can we do moving forward? And for us, thinking about our podcast, are there ways that Asian American film can cross racial lines to show that Asian Americans don't exist in racial silos and need to confront interracial issues?

As with most things, if we go back into the vault, we realize that there is a long history of Asian American interracial cinema, including some films in the spirit of social activism and solidarity.

This semester, we start with Christine Choy. She's most known for co-directing the seminal documentary "Who Killed Vincent Chin?" Before that, she co-directed the 1984 documentary "Mississippi Triangle," which looks at the intersections between the white, Black and Chinese communities in the Mississippi Delta from the late 1800s to the 1980s.

The directorial team consisted of a Chinese American woman (Choy), a Black man (Worth Long) and a white man (Allan Siegel), and they all interview their own communities (brilliant), so there is some eyebrow-raising truth-telling going on. Some of it feels dated, while other parts feel uncomfortably current. But by deeming Asian Americans as part of the triangle, Choy carves out space for us to have our own voice and agency, and not just be a wedge group that's silenced or pitted against other groups.

10 films, 10 weeks. Join us in our exploration.