Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
Since its development in the late-19th century, Chinatown in Los Angeles has existed as an enclave of diaspora, displacement and elaborate Hollywood fantasy. Today, it’s a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood, with streets that seem to flicker between past and future, artifice and authenticity. In her short film Street Angel, the multidisciplinary artist Michelle Sui (Chinese-born, Los Angeles-raised) highlights voices from Chinatown’s remaining working-class Chinese American population as she navigates its streets and intricate history. Throughout, she sings a refugee song from the Chinese film Street Angel (1937), attracting reactions of delight and curiosity from residents and passersby. Through her unique construction, Sui builds an exploration of Chinese American identity and culture that’s exponentially more sophisticated than the vast majority of media to have used the neighbourhood as a backdrop over the past century.
Director: Michelle Sui
Website: Nü House
video
Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
video
War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
6 minutes
video
Technology and the self
How the magic of photography brought Victorian England closer to the spirit realm
16 minutes
video
Home
An artist endeavours to bring the Moon down to Earth in a ritual of yearning
5 minutes
video
Information and communication
An animation built from road signs is a whirlwind study of flash communication
2 minutes
video
Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
15 minutes
video
Biotechnology
It’s our responsibility to engineer corals that can weather the world we’ve created
11 minutes
video
War and peace
A century later, can poetry help us make sense of the First World War’s horrors?
9 minutes
video
Language and linguistics
The little Peruvian guide to public speaking that conjures up a grandiose world
7 minutes