Film and Media Studies alum Wentao Ma '18 has published an article, "'Trans-'as A Method: Queer Kinship and Mobility in Louisa Wei’s Golden Gate Girls (2012) and Havana Divas (2018)," in the January 2026 Journal of Chinese Film Studies. Ma’s article argues how documentaries Golden Gate Girls and Havana Divas intersect in their portrayal of queer identity in Chinese communities in the Americas during the late 19th century. The article explores transpacific studies and transnational cinema in conjunction with the documentary form.
Ma begins the article by citing his role as a curator of the inaugural Chinese-language film festival, CineCina, in New York City in the spring of 2019. He describes his experience commenting on filmmaker Louisa Wei’s documentaries in a double-feature, how the documentaries bring forward archival research and oral-history interviews.
Golden Gate Girls profiles Esther Eng, the first Chinese American woman filmmaker, and Havana Divas traces the lives of two Cantonese opera performers in Cuba in the 1940s. Both films, Ma argues, share thematic and methodological resonances: "Eng collaborated extensively with Cantonese opera performers because her films were shot in both Hong Kong and the US, while Caridad and Georgina considered opera essential to their cultural formation." The article also answers questions such as what framework can encompass Wei’s filmmaking, how the films emphasize decolonization and resistance to empire, and what queer kinship means in the films and beyond.
Ma is a current PhD Candidate in Cultural Studies in the Department of Literature at UC San Diego. His scholarly writing and translation have been published in several journals, such as Chinese Literature and Thought Today, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and Contemporary Cinema. In addition to his academic career, he is dedicated to film curation. He is Film Programmer for the San Diego Asian Film Festival and has worked at CineCina Film Festival in New York.
