Category: Culture

Whenever it’s announced that a bona fide drag celebrity will be visiting Japan, the community here starts buzzing.“Manila Luzon? You know that she is the G.O.A.T.,” one drag devotee, using an acronym that spells out “greatest of all time,” told me three months ago when Luzon’s arrival was announced. “I am actually so shaken and excited they are bringing her to Japan.”Dec. 1 saw the third and most successful installment of Tokyo’s preeminent drag show Opulence, combining some of Japan’s best local drag talent with three of the celebrity drag queens from the hit TV show “RuPaul’s Drag Race”: Luzon, Trinity the Tuck and Kylie Sonique Love. All three queens were immensely popular casting choices, but Luzon — one of drag’s first internationally recognized Filipina American celebrities and the award-winning host of the “Drag Den” television series from the Philippines — was the name that seemed to send Shinjuku Ni-chōme (Tokyo’s traditionally LGBTQ-friendly neighborhood) into a spin. And now, the G.O.A.T. herself had arrived.

Held at venues in Naha, Okinawa, from Nov. 23 to 29, the first Cinema at Sea festival presented an ambitious and carefully curated program of films from Okinawa as well as Japan, the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. A keyword for the inaugural event was “diversity,” as festival director Huang Yin-yu and his programming team reached beyond major film production centers to places and peoples underrepresented in world cinema.“We don’t have separate fiction and documentary awards,” Huang says in an interview at Naha’s Sakurazaka Theater, a main festival site. “One reason is that a lot of islands make very few fiction films. Also, many islands have minorities living there without much of a chance to have their voices heard in cinema. It’s easier for them to start with documentaries. So it’s very important for us to include them. As someone with a documentary background, I believe cinema is cinema.”One example of this programming policy is “God Is a Woman,” Swiss-Panamanian director Andres Peyrot’s documentary that examines the complex feelings the Kuna, indigenous people living on Panama’s San Blas Islands, have about an unreleased documentary made about them in 1975 by acclaimed French filmmaker Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau. Kuna elders interviewed by Peyrot recall Gaisseau’s stay — and his exoticizing approach to their culture — with a mix of nostalgia and criticism. However, when they finally see a print of the film at a public screening, four decades after Gaisseau shot it, their reaction to seeing themselves, as well as long-departed relatives, is simply moving.