We learn a ton of things from watching films. We learn to understand ourselves, build friendships, date people and grieve over sad incidents from characters whom we can relate and identify with. This is part of the reason why representation is so important — we need to see people like us on the screen not only to feel visible but also to learn from them how to be ourselves. However, certain contents such as LGBTQ+ related films are highly censored in many countries. This lack of LGBTQ+ contents on one hand discourages the local LGBTQ+ members from forming their identity, while on the other hand reflects how well (or little) accepted they are by their community.

In this project, I inquire the accessibility of LGBTQ+ films in some typical countries — some acknowledge same-sex marriage while some criminalize same-sex relationship. Through cinematic lens, I hope to give people a quick and general idea about what the status of LGBTQ+ community is like in other places that they might not be familiar with.

Reflection

It took me the majority of time to find a suitable database and successfully register for an API key. Once I managed to get the API working, I tried out various things that I can play with using the database. There are so many different search/filter methods provided in the Movie Database, and yet I wasn’t able to find the one that would suit my original plan — which is to provide users with a list of the top LGBTQ+ movies being PRODUCED in each country. Unable to do that, I was surprised to find the release information of the movies and decided to pivot from my original idea to the final project — to visualize the discrepancies among different countries in their inclusivity of LGBTQ+ films. I’m quite satisfied with the result as it both achieves a nice visual aesthetic and conveys the message pretty clearly.

Credits

This project was assisted by the tutorials give by The Coding Train and the lecture given by Katherine Moriwaki & Xin Xin.