S4.3: Stephany Kim: Filmmakers of Color, Daily Activism and Pushing Boundaries to Work For a Better Future

I could fill this page and 50 more with words of praise for Stephany Kim.

I miss our lunches at Musso & Frank’s. I miss our laughs and inside baseball talks about archiving, Hollywood and Korean culture.
I never thought she would come on the podcast but finally it happened and more importantly, she came on to discuss the current situation in the US with the protests and #BlackLivesMatter and systemic oppression.
This episode is a little longer than normal (please forgive us) but I think you’ll agree that we had a lot of ground to cover.

I also want to point out that since the time of our recording, three more Black men have been lynched. 5 Black men hung from trees in just a little over a week. The police want to call them suicides.
No Black person looks at a tree and thinks: yeah, that’s how I’m gonna off myself. Just like how all the white folks used to kill my ancestors way back when.
NOT A SINGLE BLACK PERSON IN EVER.
While people protest for BLM, there are calculated publicly visible murders being carried out. Yeah.

And less and less white people are paying attention to the people who are protesting because they have the added distraction of having the US opening up again for business which (inevitably) will only lead to a lot more COVID cases.

That said…Stephany and I had an amazing conversation about what education had missed in the way of POC in film, our varied local experiences of the recent BLM protests, Karen Eruptions and what the archives world is(n’t) doing.
Check it out!
And don’t miss the bio below as well as the mad amounts of links!

Stephany Kim is a Coordinator, Restoration and Preservation at The Walt Disney Studios. She received a BA in Film Studies from Smith College and a MA in English (Media Preservation) from the University of Rochester. Her film-related interests are in the history of silent film intertitles and modern day approaches to intertitle recreation, preservation of home movies and family histories of people of color in the United States, and the celebrity image and its relation to parasocial interactions during the silent film era.

Her free time is usually dedicated to Polaroid portraitures, staring at pie designs (one of her favorite Instagram accounts is @crumbcrush), and daydreaming about fluffy animals and carne asada tacos. She is overly invested in THE GREAT BRITISH BAKE OFF even though she doesn’t bake.
Stephany was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley and is unapologetic for her Valley Girl accent and usage of Valspeak.

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