August 26, 2006
Between the Lines Documentary
Between the Lines is a 60-minute documentary film featuring interviews with over fifteen Asian-Pacific-American women Poets. This 2001 film by Yunah Hong is organized around topics such as Immigration, Language, Memory, Family, Spirituality, Reaching Out, and What it Means to Write. Each segment contains poetry readings as well as candid testimonials from the poets on subjects such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, and aesthetics. The documentary combines archival images with artistic cinematography to lend a cohesive visual interpretation to each poet’s words. Poets featured in the film include (among others) Shirley Lim, Marilyn Chin, Cathy Song, Mitsuye Yamada, Myung Kim, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Meena Alexander, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Barbara-Michelle Tran, Patricia Ikeda, Lori Tsang, and Kimiko Hahn. The film was screened at the Chicago Asian American Film Festival, the Toronto International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Not Hollywood: A Feminist Film Festival, Vermont Women’s Film Festival, and Seoul Women’s Film Festival. It won the CINE Golden Eagle Award in Non-Broadcast. For more information on this film and its distribution, visit Women Make Movies.
Between the Lines Discussion Questions
The following discussion questions were developed to encourage students to watch the documentary actively, as well as to consider the visual and auditory representation of the poems featured in the film.
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Which topic featured in this documentary did you find most relevant in the context of this course and why?
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Discuss the way immigration figures in one poem read aloud in the documentary. How does the poet complicate or compliment your own understanding of this issue?
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Discuss the role gender plays for several of the poets. Does this attention on women poets make this a “feminist” documentary? What is the film’s overall attitude towards gender?
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Compare the way two poets approach language and history. How does each poet treat these topics? How are the topics related?
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Describe the experience of hearing versus reading poetry. What are the benefits and setbacks of each experience?
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Now consider the film’s visual representation of the poems. How–if at all–does this interpretive cinematography contribute to the poems?