Season 7, Ep. 2: ...I Told You So (with Josslyn Luckett)

For this week's episode of Saturday School, where we're exploring Asian American interracial cinema, we have a special guest: Josslyn Luckett, assistant professor of cinema studies at New York University! We've invited her to our podcast to tell us about her research, which explores the beginnings of an affirmative action initiative at UCLA's film school in the late 1960s and early 1970s called Ethno-Communications. Before there were organizations created to center each racial group's specific experience (some of these students branched off to create Visual Communications, which produces the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival), aspiring filmmaking students of color in L.A. studied together, ventured out into different ethnic communities together, protested injustice together, got arrested together and made films about it all together. Laura Ho's 1970 short film "Sleepwalkers" explores the headspace following an arrest for protesting on behalf of an unjustly fired Black food worker. Duane Kubo's 1975 "Cruisin' J-Town," which we covered in Season 3, ends with a cross-cultural rendition of El Teatro Campersino’s “America de los Indios.” And Alan Kondo's 1974 "...I Told You So" documents Japanese American poet Lawson Inada, who grew up in a Chicano community, was influenced by Black music and later became one of the co-editors of a 1974 anthology on Asian American literature (published by Howard University Press). Brian and I often joke that accessibility is not a requirement when it comes to the films we talk about in Saturday School. Many of these films are only available in college libraries or in the archives of Visual Communications in their Little Tokyo office in downtown Los Angeles. But even if we can't watch all of them, Josslyn wants us all to know that there is a long history of Asian American, Black, Latino American and Native American filmmakers working in solidarity to document and illuminate each others' music, poetry and struggles.