She cringes looking back at her rawness as a filmmaker, but her confidence as a storyteller shone through, earning the “9-Man” positive reviews in The New York Times and elsewhere as well as a number of awards on the festival circuit.
Released in 2014, “9-Man” documents a streetball variation on volleyball that is largely unheard of outside the Chinese communities in cities across North America where it thrives. Not long after, with no formal training, she began work on her first feature.
#Deepfocus careers how to
She took film editing classes, got a camera, and started teaching herself how to make films.
As The New York Times company expanded its digital offerings, Liang saw an opportunity to widen her skill set. “Gender and race kind of collided in that space for me I don’t know if I was thinking so much about race at the time, but I was thinking a lot about access and storytelling.”Ī few years later, she ended up at T: The New York Times Style Magazine. “There were definitely things that happened to me in that world that didn’t happen to other people,” she says. As a woman and a person of color, she was a rarity in the locker rooms she worked she remembers colleagues trying to set her up on dates with the only Asian American male on the NBA beat or being refused entry into an NHL locker room despite being clearly credentialed. She landed a job after graduation at ESPN The Magazine, where she reported on the intersection of sports and popular culture. “I wanted to immerse myself in an environment where that was the norm.” “As a mixed-race person, my phenotype was a little confusing to people, but I politically and culturally identified as a person of color, she says. She was also inspired by Evans Young, the late U-M professor whose longtime role as assistant director of the Afroamerican and African studies program gave her confidence that “it was a legitimate possibility for me to be in this space.”Īs a junior, while many of her classmates were doing semesters abroad, Liang spent her fall semester at Spelman College, the historically Black women’s institution in Atlanta. “I didn’t want to feel like I was making that choice in my family, between my two identities,” she says. It provided a robust field of study that didn’t force her to choose between focusing on her own Chinese and German heritage.
While at U-M, Liang double majored in psychology and Afroamerican and African studies, the latter sparked by her brewing interest in race and ethnicity. A rash of violence against Asian Americans in the past year, and the #StopAsianHate movement that arose in response, give the story added weight they also emphasize Liang’s unique qualifications for telling it. Liang couldn’t have known that a subject that was so relevant at the time of the killing - Gurley’s death came just four months after another unarmed Black New Yorker, Eric Garner, died in a police chokehold - would feel even more so seven years after the fact.
#Deepfocus careers trial
It also follows the trial and ultimate conviction of the Chinese American officer who pulled the trigger and the competing calls for justice from two marginalized communities. The film documents the fallout from the 2014 police killing of Akai Gurley, an unarmed Black man, in a dark stairwell in Brooklyn. It also helped guide her into an unexpected career as a filmmaker: “Down a Dark Stairwell,” her second feature-length documentary, debuted in April as part of the PBS Independent Lens series.
Her desire to understand the implications of her own ambiguous appearance, and the broader impact of race in American life, has influenced much of Liang’s own life since. Born to a Chinese American father and a white German American mother, Liang spent her childhood in a predominantly white neighborhood outside Boston, where, she says, “I always felt like the ‘other.’ I was one of those kids who would look in the mirror and pinch my nose to see what it would look like if it was skinnier.” It’s difficult for Ursula Liang, ’96, to remember a time when she wasn’t at least curious about, if not preoccupied with, the idea of race. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice.
0 kommentar(er)
