Between the lines: utilizing music to shape mood in fiction

Music is woven into our everyday lives. It starts our mornings, softens our nights and sustains us through the difficult moments between. A single song can brighten a day. A familiar melody can feel like coming home. It is no surprise, then, that music plays an equally vital role in the stories we tell. Music doesn’t merely sit in the background of our favourite movies and television shows; it shapes how we feel, what we notice, and what we understand about the characters before they even utter a word. Sometimes, music whispers secrets to the audience that even the story itself is too timid to reveal. This rings especially true in queer stories, where music expresses desire and intimacy and evokes emotion that the narrative might otherwise leave unspoken.

“Langit Lupa” — Heaven and Earth, Life Beyond Death

On Nov. 9 and 10, 2024, Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien screened their newest experimental labor-activist documentary, Langit Lupa (Heaven and Earth) (2023), at 2220 Arts + Archives in Historic Filipinotown. The documentary braids personal testimonies from survivors of the violent Escalante Massacre with vivid phytograms taken from a sugar plantation in Negros, Philippines, raw 16 mm film, and theatrical performances by Escalante children. The weekend screenings and related programs were part of Camacho and Lien’s artist residency with Active Cultures, a public arts nonprofit in Los Angeles that explores the intersection of art, food, and ecologies through artist-led projects and programs.

Why Fitting in Keeps Us from Standing Out

Graphic by Jeanine Lee The genre of queer television and film is slowly evolving. This fatigued pace is worrisome, as queer media has arguably never been more influential and we have reached a pinnacle for social change. The process of…

New Film "We Were Here" Looks Back at the AIDS Generation

Netflix “We Were Here,” a documentary examining the early years of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco and its terrifying and heartbreaking effects on the LGBT community in the 80s and 90s, will be released to select theaters on September…