Fight The Power: How To Catch A Butterfly (2026) incl. panel talk

For this edition of Fight The Power: Films of Resistance, we’re screening How To Catch A Butterfly, a sharp and raw film from Kiriko Mechanicus. This short documentary investigates racial fetishization, sexual violence, and the stories written onto Asian female bodies. In 2021, Robert Aaron Long killed eight women, six of them Asian, at Atlanta massage parlours, calling his victims a sexual temptation he needed to destroy. Kiriko wrote letters to Long in prison, interrogating what his violence has to do with her own desire, and what the fetishization of Asian women—so naturalised in Western culture as to feel invisible—has to do with murder.

Following the screening, Kiriko joins writer Basje Boer, whose recent book Pose examines how cinema constructs the roles women are handed and the gaze with which they are watched, to ask how these images are made, who they serve, and what it takes to refuse them.

About the speakers

Kiriko Mechanicus (Amsterdam, 1995) is an Amsterdam-based Dutch-Japanese documentary filmmaker, writer of fiction and non-fiction, culinary researcher, photographer and art director. Her graduation film ‘A TOMATO TRAGEDY’ (2023) won the Netherlands Film Fund Wildcard Award, resulting in her debut short documentary ‘HOW TO CATCH A BUTTERFLY’ (2026).

Basje Boer (Amsterdam, 1980) is a writer. She has published six books in Dutch, both fiction and non-fiction. Her collection of essays Pose (2022), on film and pop culture from a feminist point of view, was nominated for the Jan Hanlo Essayprijs. Boer is an editor at Dutch weekly De Groene Amsterdammer and film magazine Filmkrant. She also writes for de Volkskrant.