All Posts

This month, the Anti-Racist Film Club screened the classic children’s film, My Neighbor Totoro (1988) from the legendary Japanese director, Hayao Miyazaki. While not our first exposure to the works of Studio Ghibli, I was told our audience appreciated the cozy adventure into softer themes than we normally discuss in this club. There were no racist stereotypes, lynchings, horrifying statistics, or harrowing struggles of immigration. Instead, immersed in the beautiful Japanes

The film Passing (2021) is an adaptation of the 1929 novel of the same name by Nella Larsen and unpacks the delicate themes of race, class, and belonging through a tense, psychological examination of 20th century social politics. We follow two childhood friends: Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry who’ve fallen out of touch. After a chance encounter as adults, Irene discovers that Clare has been purposefully living under the guise of a white woman in order to cross the color-lin

Languages are tricky to preserve. Last month, we discussed the cultural genocide that targeted Indigenous languages of North America. Boarding Schools mandated that children use English (or another language of the colonizing nation) and strictly enforced a ban of the local culture, customs, and language. Through violence, hundreds of languages were stolen from native peoples and, still today, there are over 3000 languages from around the globe considered to be “endangered” a

In the last few months, the Anti-Racist Film Club has been covering films on the lighter side of our tonal programming. This was not the case in January. Sugarcane (2024) is a documentary directed by Julian Brave Noisecat and Emily Kassie—two investigative journalists who follow one First Nations investigation into an Indigenous Boarding School in British Columbia. Through interviews with the remaining survivors of St Joseph’s Mission School, this documentary is an intimate