Season 7, Ep. 10: Down a Dark Stairwell

Saturday School Podcast

We promised ourselves we would finish this season by the end of 2020, as it was inspired by the events of 2020. And here we are: episode 10 of our Saturday School semester on Asian American interracial cinema.

We started from the 70s/80s and slowly worked our way up to the present. Ursula Liang's documentary "Down a Dark Stairwell" had its premiere in March 2020 at the True/False Film Fest, right before the lockdown, and has been doing the festival circuit all year. It'll be available to watch on PBS in April 2021.

It's about an innocent Black man Akai Gurley who was killed by a Chinese American police officer Peter Liang in 2014. Over 100 Black men have been killed by the NYPD in the past 15 years. The only NYPD officer who has ever been convicted is a Chinese American rookie cop that shot into a dark stairwell.

As Asian Americans, it was hard for us to watch Chinese/Asian American organizing emerge in full force yet devolve so quickly, chaotically and unnecessarily into warring factions - one deemed racist, the other deemed race traitors or worse. Does the film leave us with any hope that Asian Americans can fight for our communities, without dismissing other communities of color? Maybe only from looking back at pioneers in history and imagining where we can still go in the future. But it's one of the most powerful documentaries of the year.

We learned a lot from making this season, every time we revisited a moment where work was being done to find interracial solidarity, even if there were and will continue to be numerous missteps along the way. We hope you took away something useful from our season too. Happy new year from Saturday School, and here's to being more prepared for whatever 2021 brings.