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Kenna Wong Ghaill

Kenna Wong Ghaill

@kennawong.bsky.social

Film Programmer at the Art Theatre of Long Beach, with a monthly film column in The Ardent magazine (columns go online 90 days after print publication).

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He Wants to Believe

Aliens exist. At least, they do for Steven Spielberg. This has remained constant across a career defined by restless movement. Spielberg has spent 60 years making films about different subjects, and just as long returning to the same questions. This fascination reaches back to 1964 in Phoenix, Arizona, when Firelight, Spielberg’s largely lost amateur debut, screened once to a few hundred locals. The reels were lost while on loan to a production studio—or so the legend goes. The film followed th...

The ArdentFilm Article

Gaysploitation Forever!

Do not let factoids, TikToks, Instagram reels, or neatly packaged retrospectives fool you: gay people have not always been represented in Hollywood, not in any legible way. They were present, of course, most commonly behind the camera. But on screen they flickered in and out like phantoms: suggested and coded, but rarely named. Queer cinema began in the margins. “Gaysploitation” is one of those terms that exists almost entirely in the margins as well. There is no official entry for it in the ca...

The ArdentFilm Article

Projecting Power

“I think it would be fun to run a newspaper,” Hollywood’s boy wonder, Orson Welles, casually quips in Citizen Kane. He is about to discover that controlling information means controlling reality, and he will wield it like an infinity stone. He will not report the news—he will author it. Manufacturing public feeling, identifying enemies, galvanizing heroes, and deciding who and what the country will fear and/or love. He learns quickly what kind of power he has found. Charles Foster Kane was fict...

Film ArticleThe Ardent

Metropolis Divided

They spoke the same language but could not understand each other. Featured [in the Art Theatre of Long Beach and City Fabrick's Designing Resistance film week] alongside films about protest, architecture, and the ways artists confront authoritarian power, Metropolis occupies a strange place in this conversation. Few films have rendered oppression so vividly or visualized the crushing weight of industrialism with such overwhelming viscerality. Unlike the other works in this series, Metropolis is ...

It Is Happening Again

It is happening again. It is happening again. The now iconic phrase first uttered on a Thursday night in 1990. Now repeated ad nauseam through Lynch-coded memes on social media, it first represented the return of a great darkness. A cry for help buried deep inside of David Lynch’s magnum opus. It is happening again. It is happening again. The evil has found its way back. Fritz Lang did not leave Germany because he wanted to. He left because the ground beneath him collapsed, quietly at first, the...

The ArdentFilm Article

Sundance Review: "Josephine"

Will the feel-bad breakout of the last Sundance be this year's CODA? This weekend, Josephine (the sophomore feature from writer-director Beth de Araújo) took both the Grand Jury and Audience awards at Sundance, placing it alongside Precious, Whiplash, CODA and Minari, films that went on to define their years. Whether it follows that path remains to be seen. Josephine is eight years old when she witnesses a rape in Golden Gate Park. She is not the victim, but that distinction barely matters. The ...

Sundance Review: “Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!”

Since the first entertainers emerged with their sketches and tableaus, comedy has been meant for an audience, not an individual. The high of a laugh, a gasp, a scream shared with strangers cannot be compared to one indulged in isolation. And a film so clearly designed for the cinema cannot be enjoyed in the same way on the couch at home. We’ve heard this sentiment repeated ad nauseam over the last five years, and it has never been more true than when considering Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! An ima...

Three Conversations with the Gimp

A summary of three post-screening Q&As with writer and comedian Stephen Hibbert at the Art Theatre of Long Beach for the fortieth anniversary of Pulp Fiction. Stephen was, and still is, a friend of Quentin Tarantino. When Tarantino was searching for an actor to play the wordless but crucial role in his sophomore film of a gimp kept in a sadistic pawn shop owner’s basement, he called Stephen, The audition unfolded as a playful session between Tarantino and Hibbert, with the director acting as the...

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