Illustration by Sabahat Ahmad

As a half-Pakistani person, I often cozied up on the couch for Bollywood movie nights with my family growing up. These nights were more than a tradition—they were a rite of passage. I’m a fair-skinned South Asian, and this was a way for me to connect to my culture when I didn’t necessarily present as such on the outside. I idolized the actresses in these movies, awkwardly shaking my preteen hips and listening to soundtracks of films like Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham and Aśoka on my CD player days later.

I first visited Toronto in 2015, when I was 24. I came to heal from a bad breakup in my hometown of New York City. A year later, I met my now-husband and fell for him immediately, permanently moving to Canada. He also has a South Asian background, and it made me feel less homesick to experience the comfort of Bollywood nights with my in-laws. We’d throw in our own sassy commentary, poking fun at the soapy love scenes and dramatic dance routines while being enamoured by them at the same time.

My move to Canada was not only out of love for my husband, but love for the city. Toronto has a massive South Asian population (nearly 385,000 as of 2021). It’s also the place with the highest number of South Asians in Canada. In Scarborough, where I live, our cultures are celebrated like nowhere else I’ve been in North America. Despite growing up in a place as diverse as New York, I’d never experienced such a normalized and integrated Indian and Pakistani culture, with aunties walking around in saris and Desi aromas like masala wafting through the streets. As a result, Bollywood carries some heft as a mainstream art form here, and a more diverse range of Bollywood and South Asian films are more present on Canadian Netflix than they are in the States. It’s heartwarming to see the classics of my childhood not just in their own dedicated section but in Netflix’s most-watched films, validating and serving the viewing preferences of the population.

But in the decades between the beloved films of my childhood and Bollywood movies today, not much has changed. The very same thing that brought me comfort is also holding us back as a culture. Only years later, as we watched these movies with my husband’s nieces, did I fully understand the unrealistic beauty standards they presented. European aesthetics are put on a pedestal, and actresses are cast accordingly, sending the message to young South Asian girls that fair means beautiful. As I watched my nieces regularly straighten their gorgeous curls, I reflected on the fact that the wide range of beautiful South Asian women is and was often underrepresented onscreen.

In Canada, these same issues of colourism and racism persist despite the country being globally recognized as a place where all cultures can thrive and coexist harmoniously. This shows us just how pervasive British colonialism remains in India and beyond. In searches for Canadian Bollywood actresses online, starlets like Sunny Leone, Nora Fatehi and Lisa Ray are the first three to pop up. This is in part because they’re the most popular, but it’s no coincidence that they also have fair skin and European features. It makes me feel as though darker-skinned South Asian women are set up for failure. I worry that young Canadian girls like my nieces will inherit these Eurocentric beauty standards, negatively impacting their self-esteem and making them want to fit into an unrealistic mould rather than appreciating what makes them so unique.

In January 2024, I read that Ed Westwick (everyone’s favorite toxic drama king from Gossip Girl) was marrying a Bollywood actress named Amy Jackson. She looked suspiciously Western to me, and with the name Amy Jackson, I knew I had to dive deeper. Was this the case of a name change or something more? She could have been racially ambiguous; as someone who is overtly conscious about being perceived as fully white when I’m not, I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. I saw the dark hair, olive skin, and light eyes not unlike my own and assumed she must also be of mixed-race heritage. But after a not-so-deep dive online, I discovered that she was, in fact, an English-speaking, British white woman who was somehow ludicrously popular in Bollywood films. I had the same moment of disconnect when watching one of my favorite shows a few years back, Made in Heaven, and discovering that one of the actresses, Kalki Koechlin, was also a Caucasian woman, despite being raised in India and speaking Hindi, which has helped her fit in when she takes on these roles.

In the past, South Asian actresses who passed as white were showcased and picked first. Today, it’s enough to be white and speak the language. I don’t even think I would mind if these actresses openly acknowledged their skin tone. But the fact that it remains hidden and requires some digging begs the question: is this Brownface Lite? Is it cultural appropriation? Or is it okay if these women were raised in Indian culture and consider India their home? It’s tricky to know where to draw the line.

I’m not trying to downplay the acting skills of talented, lighter-skinned South Asian women. It’s their right to take up space in their industry of choice. But I do find it troubling that these light-skinned and white women skyrocket to fame with such ease and are sought out by directors and producers in Bollywood while thousands of talented actresses with South Asian heritage are cast aside.

Bollywood has a history of giving priority to lighter-skinned actresses, and it perpetuates the harmful side effects of the caste system in South Asian countries such as India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Skin-lightening creams are frequently advertised in India by major stars like Shah Rukh Khan, and it’s always seemed gross to me.

These messages are already too strong in South Asian culture. I attribute much of that to the brainwashing of the British Raj, which dates back to the 1850s, nailing in the mentality that if you have Eurocentric features and traits, you’re bound to succeed. These sentiments are still fully normalized and accepted.

Anyone who watched Indian Matchmaker has probably heard the bevy of problematic things the show’s star, Sima Aunty, has said, often lauding lighter-skinned people as a great catch just because they’re “fair.” She would prioritize women that fit that colourist Bollywood aesthetic for many of the show’s eligible bachelors. My own fair-skinned grandmother would use the slur “kala,” a derogatory term referring to dark-skinned people. In contrast, as someone who is often perceived as fully white, I’ve been called “gori” which refers to a light-skinned or white girl. I’ve always hated this dichotomy. I’ve heard people within my community freely comment on the skin tone of children. This widely accepted language creates a hierarchy and promotes problematic beauty standards—whether it’s meant as a compliment or a passive-aggressive criticism—and it affects children, subconsciously or not.

It feels grotesque for billion-dollar industries like Bollywood to profit off the commodification of white faces in distinctly brown roles. It screams, “brown women, this is what we want of you. This is how you can be seen as a woman.” As if darker-skinned women with distinctly South Asian features are not equally worthy of earning a “vixen” role or being picked out in a crowded audition room.

If Bollywood showed women who represent the full spectrum of South Asian beauty, it would have a global impact, expanding beauty standards in South Asia and beyond. It would improve the self-confidence of women and girls while challenging the outdated norms of colourism and even make the worlds of beauty and fashion more inclusive, making way for a more empowered female population, which we need more than ever on a global scale.

While it might seem like not much has changed, we’re moving in a more positive direction. In Canada, I see hope in talented Canadian stars like Rekha Sharma, Kamal Sidhu, Uppekha Jain, and Parveen Kaur. It’s no surprise that Canada is leading the charge in showing the many forms that brown beauty can take beyond a skinny nose and pale skin, which will hopefully create a ripple effect in other countries.

Brown women will always remain at the heart of Bollywood, and if, as audiences, we can start to acknowledge how women internalize what they see onscreen, we can start to consciously change both the everyday lexicon we use to discuss beauty and the narratives we craft.

Photo by Timothy Vollmer

“This industry is corrupt,” Lisa Milne, owner of The Royal Theatre in Trail, B.C. (population 7,920), told me, referring to the film exhibition industry in Canada, before I’d even been able to start recording our interview. She was, seemingly, dying to say it.

“The studios don’t listen to us,” she continued. “In the 15 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve had many conversations with [the studios] as high up as I can go, and they basically say, ‘Well, Lisa, that’s the way it is.’ There’s no reason why. There’s no discussion about doing anything different.”

Independent movie theatres in Canada are struggling. It may seem like common sense given streaming convenience, but the problems go much deeper than competition from Netflix. It’s in the frustrating DNA of Canada’s unique, and uniquely constricting, film exhibition ecosystem.

In March, the Network of Independent Canadian Exhibitors (NICE), a new alliance of cinemas, festivals, programmers, and other advocates, released a stunning report on the state of film exhibition in the country. After surveying 67 NICE members across Canada, the report concluded that about 60 percent were operating at a loss at the end of their most recent fiscal year. At a moment when roughly 34 percent of the report’s respondents say their theatre is the only cultural option in their community, the threat of closures is stark. But the story runs deeper: from the domination of Cineplex to changing audience habits, small theatres across Canada are struggling to survive.

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Theatres book studios’ films through distributors, and bookers at those distributors let theatres know if the films are available. It’s at this stage that troubles for indie theatres can start. For owners like Milne, particularly those whose theatres have just a single screen, studio mandates called clean runs present serious problems. This means a theatre must dedicate their screen to only one film, to the exclusion of all others, every single showtime. For a large multiplex with 10 or more screens, dedicating a screen to a single film is no big deal. Theatres with one screen, though, “can’t serve their community the way that they would like to,” says NICE secretary Sonya William.

A recent example, Deadpool & Wolverine, took the problem to new heights for Milne. She says Disney demanded, as is typical, an exclusive run for three weeks, followed by a fourth week that would be determined according to metrics unknown to Milne but communicated via her booker—if it did “well enough,” she would be forced to show it another week. “Not only do they not tell you what [well enough] is, they block you from booking a movie on that held fourth week,” she says.

In a new twist, however, her booker told her that the same would now hold true for a fifth week. Essentially, Disney demanded all future weeks be held for them “until they determine if their film comes off my screen,” Milne says. “I’ve never had this happen.”

While it’s intensified lately, this is a long-standing practice that not only hurts single-screen cinemas, but, as William put it, Canadian culture as a whole, including opportunities for domestic artists. “If a cinema has to show the same film over and over and over again, most likely not a Canadian film, that means there’s not a single showtime that can go to this local filmmaker with a smaller title,” she says. These may not sell as many tickets, but would nevertheless bring out an audience and be able to build recognition and growth.

The other major obstacle for smaller theatres is zoning. In practical terms, Cineplex instructs distributors not to send films to nearby independent theatres until Cineplex is done showing them. Even if the closest Cineplex is several kilometres away, a small theatre may still be considered to be within a Cineplex zone. As a result, local independent theatres can’t show new releases until months later. What may seem like bad programming is, in fact, due to zoning policies, sometimes called the radius clause, that lack transparency but are nevertheless aggressively enforced. It’s not clear how far the radius extends. These are unwritten rules about unseen and always-shifting zone maps that get unilaterally imposed on these theatres by Cineplex and by distributors. The rules can change at any time, and theatre owners don’t have paper trails. Several small theatre owners who spoke to This Magazine drew attention to this problem, and so did NICE.

Cineplex’s role in Canada is, without a doubt, a monopoly. It runs 158 theatres with over 1,630 screens, and it controls approximately 75 percent of domestic box office. By contrast, no one company in the U.S., the UK, or Australia controls more than 30 percent, and they have all had organizations like NICE for many years. William says the length of time it took for NICE to be created signifies just how tough the Canadian indie film scene is. It began in a grassroots way in 2018 via an online discussion board, and the group intensified their efforts during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Once they started seriously organizing in 2020, though, Cineplex was squarely in their crosshairs, and zoning is a key reason—even though it’s no longer necessary.

Zones originated with the production of 35 millimetre film prints, which were expensive and resource-heavy, and were introduced as a way to control production and maintain competition between cinemas within a geographic region. Two things have happened: digital prints negate most of the practical challenges, and Cineplex came to completely dominate the theatrical landscape, which, William told me, “really means that the competition originally suggested with the zoning rule is now gone.” Kiana Reeves, manager at The Vic Theatre in Victoria, B.C., says that because of the radius clause, they would never know week-to-week what they’d be able to show. The uncertainty can cause distrust from customers, who are left unsure of what the theatre can or will offer. Instead, it’s always promising an amorphous “coming soon.” As a result, she says, “by the time we do get it, it might be six weeks later, and everyone that meant to see it already has.”

Fatima Allie Dobrowolski, owner of the Plaza Theatre in Calgary, has the same problem. To the confusion of many at the time, she purchased the Plaza in 2021 during lockdowns, after scrolling on Instagram while in London, England and seeing it was for sale. She became determined to make sure the space would continue to exist as intended, confident that theatres would reopen and thrive again. One first step, after admitting to some naïveté, was confronting the radius clause. She built a cafe in the theatre, so the establishment doesn’t have to rely on selling tickets. While the Plaza does have many loyal customers who prefer to watch movies in the historic and newly renovated space, it still bewilders Dobrowolski “why there isn’t room for Cineplex and this little independent with one screen to also show [a film].”

Dobrowolski’s sentiment is widespread. “You’re not going to find anyone who works on this level of cinema who has much of a kind word to say about how we are all waiting in line behind them and how we’re treated as a result,” Scott Hamilton, programmer at The Broadway Theatre in Saskatoon, says. Many referred to Cineplex as a “bully,” strong-arming audiences and smaller theatres alike just because they can. In early 2023, an episode of Canadaland “Commons” featured an executive from a movie distribution company who commented anonymously about how Cineplex exerts its power, stating, “because of Cineplex’s enormous market share, no independent film distribution company can afford to do anything that Cineplex might perceive as going against its interests” out of fear that Cineplex would decide to simply stop screening that distributor’s films, a risk these companies cannot take.

Cineplex refused This Magazine’s request for an interview, and did not speak to the zoning or exclusivity policies. In a statement to This Magazine, Cineplex’s vice president of communications Michelle Saba said: “Cineplex does not own the rights to the movies that appear on our screens – we license them from distributors to play in our theatres. It is up to film distributors to decide where they play their films.” According to NICE and theatre owners, this is the company’s typical line of defence: putting blame on the distributors, while obfuscating the reality that the company’s market dominance essentially means that the distributors have no choice but to play by their rules.

Some theatres have resolved to work around the issue by almost entirely avoiding new releases. Hamilton told me about their chaotic programming, as the space also regularly hosts music and other events, which means “I am never able to offer an entire week’s run unbroken to any title no matter what the title is.” Instead, they show all kinds of older or repertory films, and the diversity of options seems to be working. “Our film numbers are actually going up,” he says, “and we’re doing that with less screening time, and that’s from more dynamic programming.” This means selecting unexpected films and turning them into an event worth leaving the house for—just one way small theatres are getting creative to try to survive.

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It’s Friday night, and you want to relax after a tough week with a movie—are you going to the theatre, or staying in the comfort of your own living room? Debates about theatres have tended to centre on the threat posed by streaming. Surprisingly, every theatre owner I spoke to says this is hardly their main concern, and a problem somewhat straightforwardly answered through better programming.

For Hamilton, even keeping his loyal audience coming back is a challenge. Like others, he’s doing this by eventizing screenings like never before—coming up with added value to turn the movie into an event, as in the case of always-raucous The Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings. Other strategies programmers use include inviting filmmakers, creating a specialty cocktail inspired by the film, or in a recent example to accompany a screening of Napoleon Dynamite, selling fresh tater tots.

Corinne Lea, owner of the Rio Theatre in Vancouver, acknowledges that at the very least, “the one byproduct that’s been good is that Cineplex has kind of forced us to be really creative.”

Eventizing, alongside expanding how we think of theatre spaces, has come naturally to some and less so to others. “We’re a very busy rental hall: weddings, live events, we’ve done wakes,” Hamilton says. “Other people are [becoming] multi-use venues by way of trying to stay open, and we were doing this before we had to.” That scrappiness and community spirit is a common characteristic, though. “It’s the volunteers and the patrons who come through when we need them,” Reeves says about the Vic diehards, “helping me paint, giving us supplies. They feel a real ownership over the space.”

Still, it’s a struggle to make ends meet. So what’s the solution? NICE and theatre owners have advocated for increases in public funding for small theatres. But even this would be welcome if insufficient, many theatre owners say, a short term band-aid for a long-term problem. Instead, they argued, governments must get more aggressive. “The government is the one that needs to stop Cineplex,” Lea says. “You can’t expect a for-profit monopoly to police themselves; you need government regulations in place.”

Unfortunately, the government thus far seems unwilling. Lea says the Rio went to the Competition Bureau, who told her they “don’t see an issue here,” in her words, and dismissed the case. In a statement, Sarah Brown, the Bureau’s senior communications advisor, says: “As the Bureau is obligated by law to conduct its work confidentially, it would be inappropriate to comment on specific issues in the marketplace. I am also unable confirm [sic] whether or not we are or will be investigating this matter or to speculate whether the conduct you described contravenes the Competition Act.”

William points out that the impact of this apparent governmental passivity is especially harsh for rural communities, whose theatres are nevertheless beholden to the same rules as those in cities. “What really breaks my heart,” she says, “is we will probably see closures the most in the rural area cinemas and the communities who really need these places”— not only to see movies, but as multi-use community spaces and cultural hubs. Not having the ability to compete means indie theatres may start disappearing at an alarming rate, leaving cultural gaps in the places they used to call home.

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Smaller theatres, of course, will keep up the pressure, with a commitment to meet the moment. While the specifics vary somewhat according to region (Benjamin Pelletier, programmer at Cinéma Moderne in Montreal, laments that few distributors in North America provide French subtitles, limiting their offerings, while B.C. theatres have been battling for fewer restrictions on serving liquor), there is consensus that things must evolve. “I have to feel like we’re doing something that’s helping grow the community,” Hamilton says, “or else I wouldn’t be interested in doing this. It’s too much stress.”

“Imagine there’s no independent theatres left, and there’s only the monopolies, what does that look like? How is that going to change film?” Lea asks, noting how industrial norms impact the medium itself. Milne, the Royal owner, puts it even more bluntly. “What hurts me as a human and as a business is not being able to cater to everybody in my community, how I know that they deserve to be catered to,” she says. “We need help fixing this broken system.”

A diehard romantic, I routinely scroll through Netflix’s “New & Popular” tab looking for the next rom-com to swoon over—and often keep scrolling. This year alone, I’ve scrolled past The Royal Treatment; Love in the Villa; A Perfect Pairing; Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between; and Persuasion. The only films I found worth streaming were Wedding Season and Hulu’s Fire Island. Yet neither moved me as much as a single scene from the Korean drama, Extraordinary Attorney Woo—more law-procedural than romcom—where the two leads press their fingers together against a window pane.

Hollywood’s rom-com genre is letting out wilted sighs as it aches for filmmakers to rejuvenate its body of work. Some critics have declared the genre “dead.” However, Scott Meslow, culture critic and author of From Hollywood With Love: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of the Romantic Comedy disagrees. He says of this past decade in Hollywood: “It was more like the decline of the mid-budget-studio-film era, and rom-coms were sort of scapegoated.”

If the appetite for romantic movies had truly fizzled, then 2022’s big releases in the genre, Marry Me, The Lost City, and Ticket to Paradise—starring rom-com veterans such as Jennifer Lopez, Sandra Bullock, and Julia Roberts—wouldn’t have performed so well at the box office. The Lost City grossed approximately $190 million worldwide against a budget of $68 million, and Marry Me amassed $50 million worldwide against a budget of $23 million.

But despite these successes, Hollywood is not investing in much beyond blockbuster superhero movies—or any intellectual property that has franchise potential. As culture writer Elamin Abdelmahmoud wrote earlier this year, Hollywood has “arrived at the nadir of original stories,” capitalizing on audience familiarity to ensure maximum profitability. In the meantime, rom-com fans have been turning to something that fulfills their desire to see two individuals overcome obstacles, against all odds, to find true love: Korean dramas.

For the uninitiated, Korean dramas (a.k.a. K-dramas) are limited-series romantic TV shows produced in South Korea. They are typically limited series—though some newer dramas have begun offering multiple seasons—and they range from around 10 to 30 episodes, sometimes as short as 25 minutes each, but typically lasting upwards of 40 minutes.

K-dramas, alongside other aspects of Korean pop culture like K-pop, have been making inroads in East Asia since the 1990s. They first gained prominence in North America, however, in the early 2010s— during what is now called the second Hallyu or Korean Wave—with rom-com series like Boys Over Flowers (2009), You’re Beautiful (2009), Playful Kiss (2010), and Secret Garden (2010). Their popularity was aided by websites such as Viki and the now-defunct Dramafever, which allowed North American viewers to watch episodes the day after they aired in Korea, with English subtitles, for free.

“[I first watched K-dramas] in university, four, five years ago,” says Mira Hajjar, a queer Lebanese-Canadian K-drama fan. Hajjar says what they enjoy most about the genre are “the little cute moments that make you kick your feet under the blanket,” like when the leads banter, do menial chores together, and make each other laugh.

Ziora Ajeroh, a university student, who has been a K-drama fan since 2015, loves the genre’s slow-burn. “You cannot pay me to watch a Hollywood romcom that came out this year,” they say. “They’re all garbage.” Ajeroh elaborates that newer Hollywood rom-coms can’t quite replicate the chemistry nor the well-written plots of rom-coms released in the 1990s and early 2000s—at least, to them. “I feel like I’ve seen every decent rom-com, at least in Hollywood.”

So what changed? For decades, the rom-com was a viable option for Hollywood studios. It was Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally (1989)—the quintessential work in this genre—that sparked the heyday of lighthearted, love-centric, and high-quality films from the 1990s to the early 2000s, such as You’ve Got Mail (1998), Notting Hill (1999), and Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), which was nominated for two Oscars and won 24 big industry awards. However, this boom had faded to a whimper by the 2010s. When films like When in Rome (2010), and Killers (2010) failed to kill it either at the box office or in audience’s hearts (both have an audience score below 45 percent), they helped kill off Hollywood’s desire to invest in rom-coms.

From 2012 onwards, one can count on the top 10 highest-grossing films each year to either be explosion-filled blockbusters, superhero movies, Disney animations, a sequel to any of the above—or even a combination of all of them, à la any Marvel film. Since these films have such a strong track record, film studios have been less inclined to take their chances on rom-coms, whose pull on audiences is much harder to predict.

Before streaming services existed, films made revenue through both the initial release of a movie as well as DVD sales. Having two streams of revenue, as Matt Damon explained during his recent appearance on Hot Ones, made it possible for studios to invest in riskier films—like rom-coms—because even if they underperformed at the box office, they could make up for it in DVD sales. Streaming services killed DVD sales and offered only low licensing fees in return, leading studios to stick with films guaranteed to make a profit when widely released in theatres.

Streaming services, especially Netflix, have tried producing and releasing their own rom-coms to combat the subsequent dearth of rom-coms. However, only a few of these movies ever cut through the overwhelming amount of content on these services to generate conversation—Can you quote a line from 2018 rom-com Set It Up? Me neither!—unless, that is, we’re referring to conversations that make fun of them (I’m looking at you, Persuasion and He’s All That!).

Ironically, the biggest force to push audiences toward K-dramas is the very force that led to the rom-com drought in Hollywood: Netflix. As K-pop’s visibility increased in American pop culture, so did Netflix’s K-drama offerings. The company began to exclusively distribute several K-dramas at the same time as they aired in Korea, beginning with One More Time (2016). It converted large swathes of unfulfilled romance fans all over the world—especially in the U.S., Canada, and India—into K-drama fans through Crash Landing on You (2019–2020), which ranked in Netflix’s Top 10 in several countries.

When the pandemic forced people into lockdown in 2020, many longed for escapism and the comfort that rom-coms brought, but quickly burned through any new ones worth watching. After hearing about Crash Landing through word of mouth, enough people watched it out of curiosity for the drama to become the sixth most-watched series on Netflix in the U.S. and to be recommended by media outlets from Variety to The Daily Beast to TIME magazine.

Hajjar recalls being introduced to K-dramas by a friend, while it was Ajeroh who pushed her friends toward K-dramas and now shares a Viki account with them. Journalist Sabra Ismath admits to casually playing Crash Landing on You—where a South Korean heiress crash lands in North Korea after a paragliding accident and must find her way back with the help of a handsome North Korean soldier— in the background when people visit, so she can casually get them hooked.

While initially some North American audience members may have looked to the K-drama as a Plan B, they quickly discovered it had certain advantages over the classic romantic flick and romantic sitcoms made in the U.S. and Canada. “Hollywood rom-coms are always on the time budget,” bemoans Ismath. “The storyline is rushed. One minute they’re talking and [the next] they’re already a couple.”

Fellow K-drama fan Hajjar loves how K-dramas deliver a fully fleshedout love story over a single season. “It also means I can watch more of them.” North American romantic TV shows tend to favour will-they-won’t-they arcs drawn out tortuously over several seasons (think: How I Met Your Mother, The Mindy Project, Jane the Virgin, Never Have I Ever) while their film counterparts can feel too short. K-dramas find the sweet spot of offering deep character development while keeping viewers engaged.

In Crash Landing on You, for example, in addition to working together to prevent the heroine Yoon Se-ri from being captured and imprisoned by the North Korean police, Yoon Se-ri also has to confront her strained relationship with her mother and brothers, while the lead male protagonist Ri Jeong-hyeok has to come to terms with the death of his older brother. Even after they overcome their individual struggles, the two still have to figure out how they can be together despite ongoing political tensions between their countries.

The leads’ family and friends tend to be more three-dimensional in K-dramas than in rom-coms, making K-dramas more relatable, especially to viewers who also come from collectivist cultures, like Avani Thakkar, a freelance writer who began watching K-dramas during the pandemic. “With Hollywood, you never get to see the family,” she says, unless the character is going home for the holidays. “But with K-dramas the family aspect is really intertwined and as a desi person, I relate to that more.”

And another reason why rom-com fans love K-dramas so much is the satisfyingly slow-burn of the romance. In the 16-episode drama Descendants of the Sun, for example, the leads don’t kiss until the fifth episode, don’t start dating until the ninth, and only get their happy-ever-after on the very last episode. There are countless memes poking fun at the speed with which Hollywood rom-com couples become intimate versus K-drama couples—and countless more memes illustrating the glee viewers experience when they do. K-drama couples build an emotional bond first by facing obstacles together. It makes their ultimate physical bond that much more rewarding for viewers, some of whom don’t rank physical affection as the only love language that matters. Aysha Akhtar, a grad student, for example, really appreciated the thoughtful things the Crash Landing on You romantic leads do for each other. “Acts of service is my love-language,” she explains. “It was just easier for me to relate to that.”

K-drama rom-coms also offer a variety of subgenres within the genre—medical, thriller, law procedural—as well as diverse settings and complex plots. Both Lawless Lawyer (2018) and I Hear Your Voice (2013) feature lawyers falling in love while working to solve a mystery connected to their pasts. I Hear Your Voice incorporates age-difference and co-habitation storylines, as well as a slight supernatural element, while Lawless Lawyer’s male lead is rougher around the edges and has a push-pull relationship with the female lead (he’s the one pulling), making the two dramas quite distinct. And even K-dramas that aren’t billed as romantic typically devote a sizable chunk of their plot to romances. But they can also be a conduit to discussing or processing topics stigmatized in many cultures across Asia, such as mental health, strained family relations, and divorce.

Though admittedly rom-com K-dramas predominantly feature heterosexual couples, there has been a slow increase in the number of queer love stories, like in the 2022 web drama Semantic Error starring former KNK K-pop band member Park Seo-ham and DKZ band member Park Jae-chan. The unexpected popularity of the drama (it was the most-watched series on streaming platforms in Korea when its finale aired earlier this year) boosted DKZ’s popularity and had their old songs charting anew.

K-dramas’ high production value—which viewers can glean from international shooting locations like Switzerland (Crash Landing on You) or Spain (Memories of the Alhambra) or Canada (Goblin), the long list of sponsors at the end which often includes names like Samsung, Swarovski, and good ‘ol Subway, and the expensive wardrobe, especially for historical dramas—also helps, if you’re seeking unapologetic escapism.

While fans have lots of material to marathon, many don’t limit themselves to K-dramas. It becomes a gateway of sorts, leading them to romantic TV series from other Asian countries like Taiwan and mainland China (C-dramas), Thailand (Lakorn), and to a lesser extent, Japan (J-dramas). A Google Trends inquiry shows interest in Chinese, Thai, and Japanese dramas gradually increasing—and in that order— in both the U.S. and Canada from 2016-onwards, mirroring the trajectory of K-dramas on a smaller scale.

Perhaps the best example of these cross-country adaptations is Boys Over Flowers (2009), a K-drama starring Lee Min-ho and Ku Hye-sun and based on Yoko Kamia’s manga series Hana Yori Dango. The manga had already been adapted into two Japanese dramas and films, a two-season Taiwanese drama, and an unofficial Indonesian drama before its Korean adaptation—which was a hit both domestically and abroad—and it went on to spawn two Chinese dramas (one a remake of the other) and another Indonesian drama. Its latest adaptation, a Thai drama called F4 Thailand, released earlier this year.

The popularity of K-dramas—and Asian dramas overall—is a welcome antidote, to many viewers, to the overwhelming whiteness of Hollywood rom-coms. K-dramas have helped combat internalized racism in diasporic Asians—developed from rarely seeing themselves represented positively in Hollywood. In one memoir piece that ran in Salon, second-generation Korean-Australian-American actress Alicia Hannah shares that getting into K-dramas prompted her to finally learn her parents’ language. In another, Chinese-American writer Christine Mah-Kellams confesses: “K-dramas cured my prejudice against Asian men.”

K-dramas are challenging the emasculation of Asian men in North American media, and, by extension, North America by presenting Asian men as viable romantic and sexual options. Although, in some instances, this borders on fetishization. Indiana University Bloomington researcher Min Joo Lee coined the phrase “the Netflix effect” to account for a surge in young Western women travelling to Seoul and staying in their hostels watching K-dramas all day, then hitting the town at night. According to a CTV report:

“The women Lee interviewed were fascinated with Korean men who were portrayed on TV as being in touch with their emotions and willing to embrace their ‘effeminate sides,’ Lee said. They considered Korean men cultured and romantic while complaining that men in their home countries often neglected their appearances and had one-track minds.”

Though many K-drama actors already enjoyed significant popularity both in Korea and across Asia, gaining a North American audience has meant more partnerships with international luxury brands, Hollywood movie offers, and a new demographic of people invested in the personal lives of K-drama stars—similar to how Hollywood rom-coms made stars out of Meg Ryan, Matthew McConaughey, and Hugh Grant, to name a few. When Crash Landing on You stars Son Ye-jin and Hyun Bin announced their relationship, marriage, then pregnancy, for example, fans of the show were ecstatic—like Ismath, who enthusiastically shared pictures of the couple’s wedding in her friend group chat. The enthusiasm over the BinJin couple illustrates that K-drama stars have begun to occupy a place once reserved for rom-com icons in North American audience’s hearts.

The heart-shaped cavity in my own head that craves romance since the romcom went into decline is filling up again thanks to K-dramas. Yet I still long for a particular brand of optimism that only old-fashioned rom-coms can inspire in me. I am hoping that the calibre of recent films like The Lost City and Ticket to Paradise is a sign of a resurgence in the genre, so I can have it all. Until my hopes come to fruition, however, I’m just a girl, sitting in front of a “New and Popular” tab packed with awesome K-drama options, asking Hollywood to step up its game.

At nine years old I was an under-the-covers reader. Even on nights when my parents were distracted by their cassette tapes and homemade wine, I wouldn’t risk turning on my bedside lamp after 8:30 p.m. Maybe my parents knew I was deep into the world of Nancy Drew or Encyclopedia Brown under those blankets, a flashlight illuminating the clues and cliffhangers on the pages.

Now, almost four decades later, I’m once again reading Nancy Drew books at 8:30 p.m. every night, only in my 10- and eight-year-old sons’ room. We join Nancy as she investigates mysterious bungalows or stolen clocks, and my youngest son makes wild guesses about what the criminals are up to. Both boys are often still debating plot possibilities after I turn out the light. I don’t think they read under the covers after I leave, but I wouldn’t mind if they did.

The popular culture of my kids’ generation is phenomenally different from the pop culture I grew up with. There is more of it, for one thing: an abundance of TV channels and streaming services, music apps that let them listen to what they want when they want, and many more book series tailored to their age group. Yet the appeal of a child detective is untouchable.

So much media for children in the tween and teen years features kids doing adult things with little adult interference. Teen-detective stories are appealing at this developmental stage because they provide examples of how a person can remain a child, while accessing the bravery associated with adulthood. Because growing up is scary.

In the most recent Nancy Drew novel I read aloud, Nancy gets knocked out then spends several chapters trapped in the gross basement of a bungalow in the middle of nowhere. For me, this is terrifying. For my kids? Well, they take it in stride. Their faith in Nancy is unshakeable. Nancy is brave, and smart—she can handle anything.

The day after we read this section of the novel, my eldest son is starting at a new summer camp. He is excited, but clearly nervous, bouncing around the kitchen, checking his outfit in the mirror, speculating on every detail of how the day might go. He is in no physical danger, but freaking out about this adventure into something brand new. Watching him go through these emotions gives me some insight into why children around his age are so attracted to stories where they see kids confronting the unknown and emerging triumphant.

And in those older mystery novels, that’s where it ends. The mystery is solved, the teen detective wins. Then everyone goes back to their sock hops—until the next mystery crosses their path. But there’s something missing from those older detective books: how do the characters feel as they go through these intense experiences? Did Encyclopedia Brown ever contemplate whether he could live up to the expectations placed on him by his father? Did Nancy Drew ever ponder her own mortality after being hit on the head repeatedly by the bad guys? Did the Hardy Boys ever wonder if their close sibling relationship would survive into adulthood? We don’t know.

These stories were written in an era where children were not expected to examine their inner lives, even as they navigated the complex emotional path to adulthood. It is something that the books published before the 1960s rarely touched upon, but I’m starting to see it in more contemporary stories. Weirdly, the place I’ve seen this navigation of a child’s inner life chronicled with the most depth and heart recently was in The Bob’s Burgers Movie.

It’s a bit of a left turn, I know, going from the classic Nancy Drew novel to an animated musical comedy about a family running a burger restaurant in a fictional town on the east coast of the U.S. And I certainly wasn’t expecting a tween detective story to shape the narrative of the full-length Bob’s Burgers movie, when I took my own family to the movie theatre for opening night.

For those unfamiliar with the series, Bob’s Burgers chronicles the ups and downs of the Belchers: parents Bob and Linda and their three children, 13-year-old Tina, 11-year-old Gene, and nine-year-old Louise. They scrape by on the profits from their underrated burger restaurant, and each episode draws viewers into their flawed but heartwarming family life.

In the full-length film, Louise is positioned as a central character as she unravels clues related to a murder mystery that many of the characters are attempting to solve. It is Louise who finds the skeleton that prompts the discovery of the murder in the first place, and in the space of a few minutes her character goes from confident and sarcastic to reeling in terror. This, combined with being teased in the school yard for her attachment to a bunny-eared hat she has worn since early childhood, sends Louise into a spiral of self-doubt. Contemplating life without her beloved hat leads her to conclude the only way she can prove that she is brave and not—horror of horrors—“a baby,” will be to solve the murder mystery. The adventures that ensue and the eventual conversations Louise has with her family allow her to gain a stronger sense of self.

This is not a coming-of-age story. Louise doesn’t get through these trials by making a clear transition into adulthood. Rather, it is a story showing the tiny steps children approaching adolescence must take to understand themselves a little better. Louise is working to solve a real, messy, grown-up mystery, while also grappling with the fear of removing her signature childhood hat, after so many years of clinging to it for security and a sense of self. The murder is ultimately solved, but the important story is really Louise’s emotional growth. In a scene near the end of the film, we watch as Louise backflips off of a horizontal bar in the school playground, and her bunny ears fall to the ground. The viewer never sees the character without her hat, but the movie shows her calmly retrieving it and placing it back on her head. The hat has become a choice rather than a desperate emotional crutch.

As the mother of a 10-year-old, I see struggles like these play out every day with my own child. I’m conscious of the trend of encouraging children to acknowledge and name their feelings, a trend that was very much not present when I was growing up in the 1980s. Recently, my son woke up on a school day and immediately declared he was sick. This had been happening a lot since the pandemic, and I was suspecting it was more emotional than physical. When I was a child, there was no such thing as a permissible “mental health day.” If I didn’t want to go to school, too bad. Faking sick was the only way to get out of it, and I could see my own kids using that age-old technique. But all it took was a quick discussion about how it’s okay to be overwhelmed and a little freaked out about whatever lies in store beyond the safety of our family home, to shift the narrative. I’m glad this shift to naming and discussing feelings as a tool for handling life’s challenges is making it into the beloved child-detective genre too, in its modern incarnations.

When my family went to see The Bob’s Burgers movie, it was Louise’s story that stood out for us, providing an unexpectedly emotional and nuanced look at the character. Viewers of the TV show have almost never seen Louise without her hat, and over multiple seasons, the hat has rarely been acknowledged or mentioned. It’s just a part of Louise, a character many viewers have grown to love.

Watching her grapple with a personal change that seems small but is actually huge for a child, all while trying to solve a murder, connects the audience to Louise more than I ever felt connected to the unemotional teen detectives of the past. And last summer, whenever we were driving somewhere for a family trip, my kids would play the movie soundtrack. Listening to them sing Louise’s words in the song “Sunny Side Up Summer” always got me: “Each and every day/ I just think I’m pretty great/ yep that’s right/ no big deal/ I’m not hiding what I feel.”

Louise may not have the clean-cut poise of Nancy Drew or the methodical detachment of Encyclopedia Brown, but in The Bob’s Burgers Movie she’s the messy, modern kid detective we all deserve.

Photo ©Disney Channel/Courtesy Everett Collection

In the summer of 2008, I became obsessed with High School Musical.

My family and I were “visiting” my paternal uncle in Canada at the time. I say “visit,” because it was more of a two-month trial for my parents to gauge whether or not they wanted to immigrate here from Lahore, Pakistan.

During the days, my aunt and uncle took our family to downtown Toronto for sightseeing. At night, they let us make a small dent in their enormous collection of Bollywood films.

During a visit to the Toronto Public Library’s Yorkville branch while on a break from sightseeing, I picked up High School Musical: The Junior Novel, a novelization of the Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM) of the same name. After reading (and re-reading) the novel, and repeatedly flipping through the eight pages of photos of the movie’s cast inside it, I became obsessed with High School Musical.

High School Musical was released on the Disney Channel two years earlier, in 2006. The film is, as the name suggests, a musical set in a high school, one named East High. Its plot centres on Troy Bolton and Gabriella Montez, who first meet at a New Year’s Eve party—during which they discover their love of song together—and later at East High where Gabriella is a transfer student.

Though Troy is the captain of the basketball team and Gabriella eventually joins the scholastic decathlon team, they both decide to follow their newfound love of music and audition for the school musical together. Their decision inspires admiration from other students, who also decide to reveal their secret passions; derision from their friends, who try their best to convince them to “Stick to the Status Quo” (a song from the movie); and outrage from the drama club royalty, Sharpay and Ryan Evans, who try to sabotage them.

The movie premiered to an audience of 7.7 million, the highest-rated premiere for a DCOM ever at the time. Fifteen years after its release, it remains the ninth most-viewed premiere of a DCOM, while its sequel, High School Musical 2, claims the first spot with 17.2 million. It has left behind an enormous legacy.

The film spawned two sequels (the third film even received a theatrical release grossing almost $253 million), three foreign adaptations, a spin-off film, a concert tour, a sing-along reunion, an ice show, an actual staged musical, a reality competition, a book series, several video games, and a Disney+ TV show that launched the career of pop star Olivia Rodrigo.

In the novel, Troy and Gabriella feel “a spark of electricity” while singing to each other that leads them to almost kiss as the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve. My prurient, pubescent brain became so fixated with that scene that I re-read it nearly every single day before returning the book. My fixation eventually evolved into a desperate need to watch its source material and witness the chemistry between Troy and Gabriella for myself.

However, since two years had passed since the film’s release, Family Channel—which owned the rights to broadcast Disney Channel shows and films in Canada—did not air a rerun and my cousins didn’t own the DVD.

When I requested them to reserve a copy at the library, I found out that it had a months-long waiting list. When I sought out the DVD in stores, its price—$19.99, as I recall—seemed exorbitant when I converted it into Pakistani rupees. When I tried to search for snippets of it on YouTube, all I found were lyric videos featuring stills from the movie.

When I finally returned to Pakistan, bought the DVD—and its sequel, which had been released a year earlier—and watched the movie, my desperation didn’t dull; it matured into mania.

I turned on the subtitles during the songs so I could write down the lyrics to memorize later, rewinding the scenes so I could get the number of getchas in “Get’cha Head in the Game” right. I practiced the “Bop to the Top” dance routine in my bathroom—my DVD had a dance practice in the bonus features. I recorded the songs onto a cassette so I could listen to them without having to set up my DVD player.

I slobbered over Zac Efron, squealed after learning that he and Vanessa Hudgens were dating and shipped—though I didn’t know that was the term for it—them together. I scoured the web for any and all news of High School Musical 3—which was released in October that year—during the short bursts in which I was allowed to use my parents’ computer. I begged my mom to buy me books from the High School Musical book series and became the proud owner of High School Musical 2: The Junior Novel, as well as four other books in the series.

I probably would have accumulated more had I not suddenly been forced to give most of my books away. My parents had enjoyed their free trial and decided to immigrate to Canada.

My parents moved our family from Lahore, Pakistan to Toronto eight months later in March 2009, in the middle of my Grade 6 school year. Though I was devastated to leave all my friends and extended family behind, I decided to view the move as the “Start of Something New” that Troy and Gabriella had sung about. However, when I arrived in Canada, I found out that High School Musical had left me woefully underprepared to navigate the North American school system.

Though my family did have a DVD player (after numerous years of breaking and fixing our VHS player), we didn’t have cable. Thus, much of what I’d learned about North American schools aside from High School Musical was through brief snippets of sitcoms on Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel, depending on what my maternal cousins—who did have cable—felt like watching.

What I’d gleaned from reruns of Kenan & Kel, Kim Possible, That’s So Raven, Phil of the Future, Drake & Josh, American Dragon: Jake Long, and Hannah Montana was that all North American schools had cafeterias that were filled with tripping hazards, science labs where experiments always went awry, and locker-laden hallways where conversations, confessions, and confrontations happened—sometimes at the same time.

This was in stark contrast to my school in Pakistan, where students brought all their textbooks and notebooks to school every day in heavy backpacks, which was probably why they stayed in one classroom throughout the day unless it was for music, gym, or lunch, and ate the aforementioned lunch in the school yard.

I’d also learnt that North American students had surprise pop quizzes, free (but not always appetizing) lunches, and no uniforms; that every school had a teacher who hated you, an athlete that everyone worshiped, and a popular blonde girl who never hesitated to sabotage you; and that it didn’t take long for new students to fit in.

I envisioned myself as Gabriella at my new school. I had brown hair and brown eyes; I had the grades and the love for reading; and I had a decent voice—I had been part of the school choir in Pakistan. I failed to take into account, however, that I also had the label of “immigrant” attached to me.

As an immigrant student, I spent several months figuring out whether pencil crayons were pencils or crayons (they were coloured pencils), what Language Arts was (English), and why students had to change into gym clothes (in Pakistan, we just had to change our shoes). As a Muslim immigrant student from Pakistan, I fielded microaggressions about my “good English,” why I didn’t wear the hijab (I started wearing it full-time in Grade 8), and how I was so smart.

This experience, I later found out, was not limited to me; many new immigrant students in North America often struggle to overcome the sociocultural and linguistic differences present between their native country and their new country. These struggles are further amplified if the students are racialized and belong to minority faiths, given how deeply Christianity and xenophobia are entrenched in the entire North American education system, including Canada.

Black students have their hair and bodies policed, are streamed into lower education tracks, and are suspended at a disproportionate rate in Canadian schools. Middle Eastern and Muslim students are called terrorists; South Asian girls are bullied for their body hair; and East Asian students are mocked for their eye shape. Nearly all racialized students are teased for their “weird-smelling” food, their perceived lack of fluency speaking English, or their cultural or religious traditions (such as oiling their hair) in Canadian schools.

Whether it is due to their race, religion, or culture, or an intersection of all three, BIPOC students often face both covert and overt racism, not only at the hands of their fellow students but also teachers and school staff.

Despite how common this experience is, however, immigrant and refugee students are almost never represented in mainstream media. When they are, they are often Long Duk Dong-esque figures used as punchlines because of their “weird” food and even weirder behaviour.

Though the casts of movies and TV shows aimed at teens have been slowly diversifying in the decade since I immigrated, the BIPOC actors almost always play supporting characters to white leads and the movies and TV shows they star in almost never capture the racism and microaggressions many BIPOC students experience in the education system.

This is also the case in the High School Musical cinematic universe. As long as the student in question is kind, hardworking, and tries their best, they can achieve everything they want. The closest High School Musical comes to showing BIPOC students’ experience in the education system is the drama teacher Ms. Darbus’s dismissive attitude toward Troy’s best friend and basketball teammate, Chad Danforth, who is Black.

Many of my teachers, throughout both middle and high school, demonstrated an amplified version of this attitude. Ms. Darbus’s attitude was limited to telling Chad to settle down in class and implying in conversations with his coach that Chad’s athletic accomplishments outweighed his academic ones. My teachers, however, regularly lambasted racialized students—especially Black boys—for ordinary offences such as being late, wearing caps, and chewing gum inside the classroom; derided them for being “loud” and “disruptive;” and treated them with decidedly less empathy than their white students. I vividly remember my Grade 8 teacher rolling her eyes at several female Black students for cheering too loudly during a school event.

Though I couldn’t earn Gabriella’s popularity, I did eventually earn her reputation of being my high school’s “freaky genius girl”—though I was more freaky than genius.

I couldn’t participate in many extracurriculars like the students in High School Musical because they required both time and energy. I needed someone to give me a ride to and from rehearsals, games, and performances; someone to pay for jerseys, equipment, instruments, entry fees, and hospital bills in case of injuries; and someone to persuade my teachers to give me extensions for deadlines that I would miss for these extracurriculars. I felt hesitant asking my parents for this, knowing how hard they were already working.

Thus, I decided to excel in the classroom instead, causing students in my grade to mock me behind my back for being a teacher’s pet. They didn’t realize that this was the only way to ensure that I received the same opportunities as my white counterparts and that despite it, I still often got passed over for opportunities, awards, and empathy in favour of my white peers. I once had a teacher yell at me to go find a park bench when I fell asleep in class after staying up all night to finish assignments.

Thirteen years have passed since I first became obsessed with High School Musical, six since I graduated high school. Yet sometimes I still seethe with anger at the callousness that I and my fellow immigrant, racialized students experienced—and continue to experience—in the Canadian education system. I wish I could go back in time, armed with the knowledge and confidence that I now possess, and stand up to the teachers and students who doubted, dismissed, and derided me and my peers.

Though some Canadian school boards now offer anti-racism support—after numerous demands from racialized students and parents—the Canadian education system continues to harm and disadvantage immigrant and BIPOC students.

Fifteen years ago, Troy and Gabriella and the rest of the East High Wildcats assured the world that “We’re All in
This Together.” They were wrong.

Illustration by Deshi Deng

I love sci-fi. I have since I was a kid, and I especially love weird cyberpunk movies. Lately, though, the main thing I notice in sci-fi is creators’ inability to envision a world without violence against sex workers. This really hit me watching both the 1982 film Blade Runner and the 2018 Netflix original Altered Carbon. Both utilize a similar film noir in a dystopian future premise, which leads to having similarities in how sex work is viewed in their stories. Altered Carbon has sex workers as an integral part of the plot and Blade Runner utilizes pleasure bot gynoids as the villains and a more reserved, ladylike gynoid as the main love interest. They were released 36 years apart and yet nothing has changed when it comes to the perception of sex work in either. Once I started paying more attention, I started noticing the contempt sci-fi holds for sex workers beyond just these two works.

In sci-fi, the class divide between the ultra rich and the rest of the world is made abundantly clear. They show us the nice, clean, sterile environments where the nice, clean, usually white, ultra rich live and contrast that with the violent, chaotic, dirty slums of the rest of the city or world. In these slums there are bright, colourful images of women shaking their bodies around. Billboards, holographic projections, and full service sex workers are everywhere in the streets. It’s a male fantasy hyped up on gigabytes with humanoid, artificially intelligent cyborgs who can appear and disappear as needed. You can have it all, as long as you can pay.

Within two episodes of Altered Carbon, protagonist Takeshi Kovacs befriends a sex worker named Alice to gain some knowledge about the case he is investigating, just for her to die once he has the information he needs. Alice is never seen in the show again and never given any real moment of mourning. Sex workers are the ones who experience violence and death because, due to their work, there is no regard for them as complex human beings.

The series revolves around the idea that bodies are just a fleshy host for a human consciousness stored on a futuristic disc that can be removed, and yet I don’t recall seeing people doing extreme sports to the point of body death, or having their bodies used in violent ways as the sex workers do. Their bodies, and the consciousnesses within, just don’t matter enough to be valued or have their deaths investigated.

Sci-fi often relies on the concept of improved bodies, whether it’s cybernetic body mods or completely fake robotic bodies. This brings up the idea of female androids, known as gynoids, being made specifically to fulfill a male fantasy, as Rachael was in Blade Runner. Rachael was made by Tyrell, the creator of the machines, to provide companionship and to test how they develop with false memories. The gynoid comes up often in sci-fi; the first appearance can be found in Metropolis, a film from 1927 where a robot is given skin so she can replicate a human and work as an exotic dancer. Since then gynoids have been used in sci-fi to be the perfect woman, submissive and ready for sex at all times.

Androids, such as Data from Star Trek, are seen accomplishing hard goals, completing tasks that are difficult for humans, and furthering their careers. They are created to do what man can do and surpass them. They are expected to learn the meaning of being human and reflect back important truths for humanity. Gynoids are made to be used, to be tested, to see how far they can be pushed and broken. When Data makes a daughter, Lal, she is put through a series of tests until her brain literally breaks down like any other machine on the ship and subsequently dies all within one episode.

Within sci-fi works there is an implication of legality for sex work. The protagonists are law enforcement or law adjacent, some kind of voice of reason and a moral compass for the viewer. Yet they never care much about the sex workers and their working conditions. Their main concerns with the businesses revolve around the owners’ other shady side gigs rather than the violence the sex workers are experiencing. It informs the world-building narrative on how sex work is viewed within these so-called radical futures.

It’s an acceptable career, with people of many genders and races working within it. However, it is intrinsically accepted that they will experience violence and no one will do anything to stop it. But they aren’t owed respect for this job, they are disregarded and murdered constantly, and the protagonists—as well as other characters—don’t bat an eye at another dead sex worker.

Framing these bodies—these sex workers—in this way shows that, despite being advanced in technology, the future still remains incredibly bleak when it comes to sex worker rights. There is no care or consideration despite the generally perceived acceptance of the career. Which begs the question: if sex work is legal, why are there no protections? There are some burly men around the doors of the sex clubs preventing weapons from getting inside, but nothing to prevent sex workers being murdered. There do not seem to be any laws to fall back on to create safety, no defense systems beyond the doormen, nothing they can fall back on for help. Where are the alarm buttons? The safety weapons for the workers? The harsh punishments for clients who injure workers?

Consider for a moment Inara Serra, Firefly’s (2002) resident companion. Within the Firefly universe, sex work is presented as an honourable and enjoyable trade. Oftentimes throughout the series, ship engineer Kaylee Frye refers to the job as exciting and glamorous, even fantasizes about the opportunity to do the same work and hangs out with Inara to learn more about how the position works. We see her carefully screening potential clients, only picking those she wishes to spend time with. When a client threatens Inara, she quickly makes it clear that he will not have access to her or any other sex worker again. She has respect and standing both among the crew and in any society they visit, and she uses this to get the crew out of rough situations.

People respect Inara and the work she does; she has defenses and can have bad clients banned so they can’t see another sex worker again. This setting provides sex work legitimacy, safeties, respect, and schooling. There is a sea of sci-fi that takes influence from Firefly in other ways, yet it seems no others have ever wanted to utilize the concept that sex workers may at some point be considered worth protecting and even admiring.

Why have there been so few works that have bothered with an apparently all-too-radical idea that sex workers are, in fact, people and deserve to have rights, security, and safety in their trade?

Present-day sex workers are fighting for decriminalization, for safety, for protections—why can’t we see these things existing in these works? We’ve become so complacent in the idea that sex work is something that deserves aggression, violence, and even death, that even in these so-called advanced futures we can’t imagine otherwise. We still see sex workers as disposable because it is the easiest way to see them.

Without complexity, without stories and lives, just another plot device that is killed to give the main character reason and purpose.

In North America, many Hollywood stars of Indian descent are household names: Mindy Kaling, Priyanka Chopra, Kumail Nanjiani, Hasan Minhaj, and Scarborough native Lilly Singh. According to YouTubers Colin and Samir, Hollywood has realized that Indians—in North America and India—have the buying power to demand representation on screen.
I think we’ve always known this, but box office smashes like Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians proved the point to executives that people of colour will pay for good entertainment.

So, what does this mean for diasporic Indian viewers? Do we see ourselves being represented? Are our stories being reflected? What I’ve seen is that we are no longer just Apu on The Simpsons, a lonely housewife, a doctor with no voice, or a creepy science geek. Characters who portray us have developed beyond the stereotype and reflect the realities of life in North America as Indians. Moreover, we’ve gone beyond the Sikh, Punjabi-centric depiction of Indian-ness, with writers and stars who are from South India, or who are Muslim. But sometimes I ask myself, how does this even matter?

It wasn’t until I was 18 years old that I first consciously thought about being represented in media, likely because I was raised in Dubai. And though I was educated amongst and friends with British kids, I never sought external validation of my culture—I was surrounded by it in the form of extended family and family friends. I lived in Auckland briefly in my teens and then moved to Toronto for my undergraduate degree. It was 1998 and I was watching Deepa Mehta’s Earth at a film festival in Auckland. This is the second film in the Canadian filmmaker’s trilogy, which also includes Fire (1996) and Water (2005). Actress Nandita Das’s beauty, which is unlike the fair-skinned, overly made-up looks of many Bollywood actresses, caught my attention. But it was the film’s historical-narrative echo of stories both of my grandmothers had told me that had the most impact.

Earth is the story of India’s Partition in 1947, told through the voice of Lenny (Maia Sethna), a Parsi girl living in Lahore. My father is also Parsi—Zoroastrians in India were loyal to the British throughout their rule of India and remained neutral through Partition. Until seeing Earth, every Partition story I had heard was from my maternal grandmother, a Sikh who herself was displaced from the city of Lahore
during Partition.

In the early 2000s I prioritized watching the deluge of films made by diasporic Indian women: Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding (2001), Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham (2002), and Bride and Prejudice (2005). Each release was a big deal, shared with friends at a theatre and with family over the phone. I’d chat with cousins about which character reminded us of which relative and how weddings in the movies compared to real life. Each of these movies represented a version of Indian culture and, in particular, Indian women, which was familiar—urban, educated, liberal, fun, and loud. I felt connected to these representations. It was during a conversation with my maternal grandmother about Monsoon Wedding and Fire that I realized I could come out to her without facing the line, “Indians are not gay.”

In 2005, Mehta’s Water, the conclusion to her trilogy, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). I was angered. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had to explain the sense of autonomy I had been raised with to people around me—to justify my independence and assure them I was not going to be forced into a marriage or shunned if widowed. My anger was directed at Mehta, who herself comes from privilege: why does Mehta always tell stories about oppressed women when she herself does not have that experience? India has a patriarchy problem and this should not be silenced. But why, I wondered, couldn’t she make films which defy the stereotype that all Indian women are oppressed, rather than placate the western gaze?

To make matters worse, Canadian actress Lisa Ray, whose father is Indian and mother is Polish, was cast as the film’s protagonist. The way I see it, women as light-skinned as Ray would probably have been protected from these sorts of practices by wealth and have been shunned inside a mansion, rather than an ashram, which is what happens in the film. To me, this story lacked credibility, though I know it was based on fact and historical practices.

The release of Slumdog Millionaire (2008) at tiff, and its eventual critical success, felt like a global turning point. The film itself felt like a pantomime of poverty in India—a true story, told by a British person lacking cultural nuance and perspective. The popular music from the movie still makes me cringe. Jai Ho! No.

Around the same time, I started paying attention to Mindy Kaling, who by the late 2000s was known for her role as Kelly Kapoor on The Office (2005-2013), as well as a writer on the show. I was never a fan of the show, but when I heard about Season 3’s “Diwali” (November 2, 2006) episode, I was intrigued. Somehow, it sounded subversive, like Kaling clapping back at everyone who expected her to do the representation thing. And as her career has grown she’s written, produced, and directed several shows which have kept clapping back. As Mindy Lahiri in The Mindy Project, she acted as a doctor who wore her brownness only on her skin and in her name. There are no grand displays of culture; this is a character who is brown because the actress is brown, the essence of whiteness coated in brown. And I kind of loved that. Kaling is public with her pride in being both Bengali and Tamil, so it is not self-hate or a lack of relationship to Indian-ness which informs her decisions. Kaling was intentional about making The Mindy Project fun, funny, and entertaining. Rather than writing an Indian character who would make non-Indian viewers feel comfortable through stereotype or cultural celebration, Kaling wrote Dr. Lahiri to be who she wanted her to be.

In a sense, seeing my people and stories about my people in Western media is often unsettling, rather than entertaining. Through the western gaze, even if written by Indians, these stories are designed to either placate by reinforcing stereotypes, or appeal by diluting the substance behind the story. And this is not restricted to Indian-ness. The original L Word didn’t resemble my mid-2000s, mid-20s, lesbian life. But I remember the straight men around me at the time loving it. And I know that Hollywood keeps remaking slave stories because until recently that was the only way they knew how to make a movie with a large Black cast entertaining to white people. It’s a familiar narrative.

Who stars are off-screen matters too, especially when they step into activism.

Priyanka Chopra is the first successful Bollywood-Hollywood crossover star, the actress who recently celebrated her one-year wedding anniversary with Nick Jonas, a member of the pop band the Jonas Brothers. I’m supposed to celebrate her—but I cannot; instead I am ashamed.

I remember a video about when Priyanka Chopra decided to move to America from India and joined the cast of Quantico (2015); she spoke about the role she plays, that of Alex Parish, being created for her and how good Hollywood had been to her. But in 2018 she joined other women in Hollywood speaking up for #EqualPayDay, about how women of colour are not afforded equal treatment to their white and male counterparts, and that she wants to be part of the change in Hollywood. This flip-flop demonstrates political opportunism, a need to get involved with movements and perform solidarity for the sake of her reputation, rather than an actual investment in the eradication of racism and sexism in Hollywood.

In 2019 Chopra came under fire for commenting on India’s military attack on Kashmir, which is currently in a concentration camp-like state. Her February 26, 2019 tweet on the subject demonstrated her support for the attack, all while being a UN Goodwill Ambassador. Later in the year, when a Pakistani woman tried to hold her accountable at a public event, Chopra responded by belittling the woman and describing the woman’s question as “venting.” Chopra looked bad, showing a lack of transparency and integrity. She was perceived as being anti-Muslim and pro-war in the Kashmiri conflict.

This is not who I want representing me, nor how I want to be represented in the media. Closer to home, and in the media in an entirely different way, the representation-of-Indians conversation was at the forefront during the 2019 federal election. Jagmeet Singh, the leader of the ndp, is the first person of colour to lead a party and run for the position of prime minister in Canada. This is supposed to count for something—but what? What has Singh achieved that means we can confidently call him a leader? He is respected for deflecting hate and promoting love when confronted with racism, but it seems Singh is more celebrated for his bespoke suits, colourful turbans, and overall style, than for any political accomplishment in the interest of Canadians or Indigenous people. Being the only person of colour to lead a party just may be his greatest achievement, and that is not enough.

If representation counts for anything, it is for us to be taken seriously, which will only come when we take ourselves seriously, when we operate with integrity and intent, rather than grasp at what is dangled in front of us. Accepting opportunities because they are given is an act of desperation, a role India and Indians had been happy to play for Britain—our most recent colonizer—and the settler nations we have chosen to inhabit. We have been happier to sit silently at the table than to not sit there at all. And stories on the screen are told by writers sitting around a table, sharing ideas. Some,
like Mindy Kaling, have been talented and confident enough to speak up.

Good representation also exists, in the form of two Canadian journalists, Shree Paradkar and Scaachi Koul, who embody their Indian-ness without it wearing them down, or serving as adornment. Both are cultured, critical, and loud; they are talented and secure enough to be vulnerable and speak with purpose. Koul, who was born and raised in Calgary, uses humour as a culture writer to show the reader how different yet valid her perspective is from most of what has been written or seen before. While Paradkar, who was born in India and immigrated to Canada as an adult, uses facts and historical reference to show Canada its failings, as a race and gender columnist for the Toronto Star.

Neither is caught up in curtailing displays of culture to ensure white people maintain comfort, nor in being shocking or provocative. To each, Indian-ness acts as part of their platform, their leverage, their value and awareness of their relationship to whiteness. Both write alongside whiteness, rather than as a response to it.

We must fill the gaps ourselves; if we want to be reflected we must project ourselves as nourished, grown, thinking characters and our stories as those which are entertaining as well as informative. It has been proven that purchasing power and moneyed audiences exist. We deserve to tell our own stories on our own terms rather than for the comfort of executives and white audiences. Seeing oneself on screen is not enough if who you see is empty. Representation is lost if it doesn’t stand for anything.

Inside Vernal Small’s tailor shop, Jamall Caribbean Custom Tailor, near Eglinton and Oakwood. Photos by Sharine Taylor

Living in Toronto means I’m not too far from Jamaica. Not because geography affords proximity, but because the presence of the diaspora has made itself known. Over 200,330 people of Jamaican descent reside in Toronto alone, and that’s evident by the countless restaurants, small businesses, specialty shops, and grocery stores that populate the city. Though people who have migrated from the island have settled all over the country, in the 1970s during a heavy period of migration from the Caribbean, select pockets of neighbourhoods in Toronto were concentrated with people from the region. One of those neighbourhoods was Little Jamaica.

For a few months, when I was around seven years old, I lived right off Trethewey Drive, a street in Toronto’s west end, inside a low-rise, yellow-brick apartment with my mom, aunt, and cousin. Every other weekend, my aunt would drag us to Eglington Avenue West to get her nails and hair done, and over time it became my favourite spot to grab pan chicken cooked in the recognizable repurposed oil drums just like back home. The Little Jamaica community, which stretches from Eglinton Avenue West and Keele Street to Eglinton Avenue West and Marlee Avenue, was known for its vibrant Caribbean community and the proudly Black-owned businesses that once lined its streets. However, due to the almost eight-year, ongoing construction of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, with aims to make travelling between the east and west end of the city easier, the area has been subject to a decline in business, and questions about the preservation of cultural heritage and legacy are being raised.

I began thinking about preservation and archiving. How many first-gens who share complicated hyphenated identities have to explore the histories of where they come from outside our home and native land, have to do so of their own accord, even if those seemingly distant histories are deeply bound up in the Canadian experience. Canada’s 1955 West Indian Domestic Scheme? The Jamaican Maroons in Nova Scotia during 1796? Those histories exist outside of our educational curriculums, and if we’re not aware of our own stories, whose job will it be to pass these narratives on to the generations that come after us?

Last summer, I was granted an opportunity to add to the ways we chronicle our histories. Fabienne Colas, a Montreal-based Haitian actress, asked, “What does it mean to be Black in Canada?” Through the Being Black in Canada program, run through her self-titled foundation, she gave emerging and first-time film directors an opportunity to explore what those answers could be. There was an unshakeable sense of urgency that made me want to focus on Little Jamaica, which had rapidly turned into a neighbourhood that was in a perpetual state of uneasiness and erasure.

I didn’t anticipate my film, Tallawah Abroad: Remembering Little Jamaica, becoming a project that consumed me in the ways that it did. Not because filmmaking was a daunting and challenging feat, but because I knew that, beyond filming, the people who lived, worked, had families, and were part of this community still had to contend with their realities. Despite documenting what this neighbourhood looked like two summers away from its scheduled completion date, people still had rent to pay, people still had mouths to feed, people still needed to survive. The almost eight-year task that has been creating an extended LRT line has entirely depleted the character of a community. What will be left of what we’d made of that space beyond a mural, a stationary roadside plaque, and the renaming of a back alley to Reggae Lane? In the eight months since I’ve filmed, shops have closed, lives have changed, and an important pillar of the community—Ronald “Jimmy” Ashford Wisdom—has died.

This all made me begin to think more about who gets archived in the collective Canadian, or even Toronto, memory. Whose cultural legacy and heritage are etched into our public and national consciousness? Canada touts diversity, by virtue of its immigration policies and the many Black people and people of colour who benefit from them, as its biggest asset. But it simply sees diversity as something to be achieved, a checkmark made to signify completion—and little thought is reserved for thinking about how and what diversity looks like in practice, beyond nation building or adding onto the national mythology. When we’re no longer of use for domestic labour, seasonal agricultural work, or any other surface reasons, are we not still worthy of being remembered?

I’ve discerned that much of the Black experience historically has been living in transit. We were kidnapped from the continent and brought to foreign land by force, through blood, and over hills and valleys too. We seem to be forever engaged in a never ending race towards freedom both literally and metaphorically. And this hasn’t changed from our contemporary realities as we come to know them through the plights and familiar stories of our migration. Though we may leave any area we’re in for an array of reasons, we seem to be a restless people, always running towards or away from something, but always with the ability to recreate home in the most innovative ways. Is it cruel irony that in the case of Little Jamaica, a transit line largely for other people is prioritized over our own sense of belonging? Perhaps.

I realized the process of etching who we are and what we’ve done into a collective national imagination is a bank of knowledge that is to be created by our own hands and powered by our own voices. I mean, who can tell the story of the paradoxical Black experience better than us? We’re made to feel both hyper visible and invisible. Our community is everywhere, but nowhere. We are known and unknown, and maybe that aspect of our identity makes us unique.

Perhaps Canada shouldn’t rest on its diversity and multicultural laurels too much if it means we don’t actively preserve the cultural legacies of the people who colour the nation. When the people who have been responsible for documenting the history of this nation are not intent on honouring the lives of people who have contributed to its tapestry, they take away from the possibilities and power of what could become should those stories be heard. The table’s big enough, and we should have a seat too.

“Horror Movie Illustration” by Kaitlyn Haddlesey (Creative Commons)

Horror has always been a marginalized genre, a misunderstood, even reviled vehicle dismissed as a disgusting, juvenile playpen for amateur talents. When it does become popular—such as during the post-Hiroshima years, or Nixon’s tenure in the early seventies—it has a brief moment in the limelight before being relegated back to the shadows.

So why has horror become so popular in the last three years?

The real question is what are we currently scared of?

Some of horror’s current popularity comes from remakes and continuing franchises, such as It, The Conjuring, and Halloween; some of it comes from the emergence of fresh, effervescent voices that speak to our current reality. The scarier reality gets, the scarier our stories become, and our current political and social climate has conjured grim horrors, including racism, white nationalism, misogyny, greed, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, environmental destruction, Islamophobia, child abuse, and xenophobia.

In response to these fears, filmmakers such as Jordan Peele, Jeff Barnaby, and Issa López have produced excellent, stunningly crafted films. Peele’s Get Out brilliantly satirizes racist white liberals, while his second film Us underscores the plight of the disenfranchised in America. Barnaby’s Blood Quantum, the follow-up to his exquisite Rhymes for Young Ghouls, uses a zombie narrative to attack Canada’s devastating colonial structures. López’s gorgeous fable Tigers Are Not Afraid follows a group of young orphans in Mexico who face brutal treatment after their parents are murdered; the cruelty the children face echoes the horrifying treatment that immigrant children have endured at the hands of ice in the U.S.

These and other films not only frighten us; they enlighten us by giving us a vocabulary that allows us to articulate—and therefore confront—our fears. Naming the monsters is half the battle in defeating them. As an example, the Sunken Place from Get Out has become an ominous symbol for the oppression of Black people.

These films also comfort us. They dissect the horrors so we can safely study them through the comforting distance of the screen. To paraphrase Stephen King, we know that a movie will end, which gives us hope that the pain we experience in real life will end, too.

Mainstream movie studios such as Universal, Warner Bros., and New Line Cinema have been producing big-budget horror films with increasing regularity over the last few years. While horror has always been a stronghold for independent filmmakers—The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, and The Blair Witch Project are but three prominent examples—seeing big studios take notice is encouraging. According to The Numbers, horror films have generated over $3 billion at the domestic box office between 2016 and 2019; 2017’s Get Out took in over $176 million alone. Many popular television shows, including American Horror Story, The Twilight Zone, The Walking Dead, and The Haunting of Hill House, also focus on scaring audiences.

While horror has always featured outcasts, such as Frankenstein’s monster and Jason Voorhees, these outcasts and the people telling their stories have predominately been white men. Horror stories have been around since the beginning of humankind, but mainstream films and television shows have only recently begun to feature racialized, LGBTQQAI2+, and Deaf and disabled artists.

The true purpose of horror is connection, the community we feel after sharing and working through our mutual fears. Horror is not just an entertaining means of dealing with what scares us; it provides the perfect vehicle for marginalized voices to tell their stories with all their visceral truth. There are no limits to a horror film, so there are no limits to the storytelling possibilities.

There is no guarantee that horror and the voices it promotes will permanently become prominent parts of our cultural landscape. But if we keep buying movie tickets and supporting these filmmakers, then maybe, at the very least, the conversations we have may shift just enough for our fears to diminish a little. We will always be afraid of something, but maybe we won’t be deathly, constantly, apocalyptically afraid.

CINDY BAKER’S PERFORMANCE CRASH PAD

When you imagine international hubs for radical contemporary cinema and performance, Regina might not come to mind; but it should—and that’s thanks to Gary Varro.

In 1995, Varro was an assistant curator at the Dunlop Art Gallery inside the Regina Public Library. Around that time, the space was displaying an exhibition on Indigenous representation in mainstream Hollywood film. Noting its success, the gallery’s curator suggested that Varro put together a similar show exploring mainstream representations of their LGBTQ community in film.

The idea stuck with him. Varro felt that queer folks in Saskatchewan desperately needed a place where they could see themselves reflected in the cultural content around them. LGBTQ representation was still mostly confined to cities like Toronto, Los Angeles, and New York City. Making queer media accessible in Regina became both a personal and professional project for him.

Soon after, the Queer City Cinema (QCC) film festival was born. For nearly 25 years since, QCC has featured films by and for the LGBTQ community at the annual festival, highlighting Canadian and international work from outside of the mainstream. The priority is “showing films made by us, for us, unapologetically and without shame,” Varro says.

Audience favourites have ranged from Vivek Shraya’s biographical work I Want to Kill Myself to Kent Monkman’s alternative art history film Casualties of Modernity, and Dayna McLeod’s I Live for Menopause, which confronts ageism with humour, a lively dance track, and her own queer and aging body.

More recently, QCC has expanded beyond film to include performance art. “I like it because it’s still a very marginalized art practice,” Varro says. “The word queer itself just seems to lend itself to performance art. It’s unusual; it sort of pushes against convention and expectation; it can disrupt the status quo.” In 2015, American genderqueer artist Kris Grey’s performed Homage, which explored Grey’s out-of-body experience of watching their chest bleed after top surgery. In 2018, Bengali artist Nabil Vega performed Visiting Thahab, where she considers the Muslim American femme identity in a post-9/11 diaspora.

After decades of support and community-building in the prairies, Varro is taking selections from the festival on the road. QCC will hold its sixth national tour in January and February of 2020, visiting five Canadian cities east of Regina: Winnipeg, Ottawa, Montreal, Sackville, and St. John’s. “The tour is meant to go places where this kind of work is hard to come by,” Varro says, offering two nights of screenings during each stop.

The East Coast events will feature new works and old favourites, including films from the festival’s fall 2019 program Bad(Ass) Bodies. Able, a short film by Scotland-based Canadian Sandra Alland, uses stop-motion photography, poetry and language from benefit applications and medical questionnaires to interrogate ableism. Flora, an animated film by South Korean artist Chaerin Im, uses flower-like sculptures resembling sex organs to critique the correlation between gender and biology.

Audiences “want to see work that is outside the mainstream. They want to see work that is experimental. They want to see work that is by trans artists and QTBIPOC artists,” says Varro. “It serves to fill a gap that isn’t being filled by the more mainstream LGBTQ film festivals.” Both at home and on the road, QCC’s goal has never been to reach the widest audience possible. Instead, it’s bringing together queer folks who can appreciate the life-sustaining nature of these works.

MODERNITY