Hello! Today, a beautiful Georgian film, a collection of speculative fiction by writers from China and Hong Kong, a short film about maps and two articles about the long shadow of British colonialism in finance and TV.

Also, a small work-related interlude: we are kickstarting Translating Feminisms 2, chapbooks by women and nonbinary writers from Indonesia and the Philippines. At the time of writing this, we are 97% funded with 20 days to go, but if you want to chip in, get yourself some poetry or prose (with very reasonable shipping costs) and support us and the brilliant writers and translators we work with, that would be lovely. 

Article: Why British historical dramas are whitewashed propaganda by Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, published by The Daily Dot in June 2020
I’m notoriously bad with television. I tend to rewatch favourites from the early 2000s (shoutout to Charmed!) instead of finally checking out any of the recent prestige dramas. The idea of committing time to something new that doesn’t come in a 90-140 min package stresses me out. Frankly, I think I’m only capable of watching complete nonsense TV several months or years after it first aired (see also my recent mention of the 11th season of Supernatural). But I have watched The Crown, which is one of the shows Gavia Baker-Whitelaw looks at in her short piece on the histories left out by historical dramas: “In the vast majority of British historical dramas, we’re led to believe that rich, white people were at the center of the universe. Their struggles revolve around love affairs and exciting feuds over inherited power, with no hint of the iceberg of horrors supporting the glamor above the surface.” Sounds right!

Film: And Then We Danced (2020), written and directed by Levan Akin
The other day I was wondering aloud what the best film was that I’d seen in the cinema before March, and this turned out to be the one that really stuck with me: a Georgian coming-of-age story with some of the most memorable dance scenes I’ve ever seen, and a final sequence to rival that of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Merab is a young dancer training at the National Georgian Ensemble, making ends meet by working at a restaurant in his spare time. The arrival of Irakli, a replacement dancer, changes everything. So far, so enemy to friends to lovers. But what director and writer Levan Akin does really well is to weave in Merab’s family life, his friends, his job, the conversations he overhears at parties (shoutout to the subtitlers!), the random people he encounters in the street... until the viewer is left feeling that they’ve had a glimpse into a real life for 105 minutes. I can’t wait to watch it again, and since it’s now streaming everywhere that you can legally rent films, now might be the time.

Book: That We May Live (2020) by various authors and translators
I promised myself I would only read for pleasure in August and I must say it’s been pretty great. Last weekend I finished this short collection of speculative fiction by six Chinese writers, lying under a tree in a local nature reserve after a delicious breakfast. I read a story about mushroom houses and mushroom house speculation; then a story told by a protagonist who redefines casual labour as a lifestyle; and finally a story about women trees being turned into furniture. As I slowly sweated in the warm Vienna air, I lazily thought about inequality and women’s bodies, pollution and surveillance, and how each of the writers and translators in this collection illuminates various aspects of our horrible world with precise, beautiful language and narratives that often had an incredibly compelling, dreamlike quality.
Note: I hesitated before including this because the publisher of That We May Live doesn’t offer ebooks (!) and shipping costs for this title are prohibitive if you don’t live in the US; but your local bookshop may well have it in stock. My friend just found a copy in Berlin. It’s worth tracking down.

Learning: White markets, black markets by Philip Roscoe, part of the How To Build A Stock Exchange podcast
This article is actually a podcast (but there’s a transcript if you want to read instead of listen; for new-ish readers, I actually listen to many of the longreads I recommend here via the Audm app). Roscoe, a sociologist, examines the racialized structures of finance, starting with the Zong massacre and legal case of 1781 (the captain of a slave ship ordered 133 of the enslaved captives drowned; the court case that followed was an insurance claim (!)). He goes on to explore “the patterns of exploitation that underpin finance” via the financial crisis of 2008 up to the present day. I know very little about finance and couldn’t follow every detail but would very much recommend reading/listening to this if you want to understand a part of our world better that shapes so much.

Other: Counter Mapping
Every summer is the season of open air cinema here in Vienna, and every season is the season of me forgetting about things and not booking ahead (which is particularly necessary this year). This 9 minute short film was a part of the Architekturzentrum Wien’s excellent summer film series on architecture and crisis. It was fully booked, but luckily you can legally stream a lot of the films online. Counter Mapping follows Jim Enote, a Zuni elder based working with Zuni artists to provide an alternative way to understand and create maps which offer an indigenous voice and perspective rooted in place. My friend and I talk a lot about maps and power, and this was great.

That's it! If anybody has any recommendations for what to do with wild plums, let me know, there are tons of them where I live. Take care!