Sexual fetishes of white men toward Asian women have persisted for centuries — burdened with the macabre and racist promiscuity they inherently carry. In 2021, however, when Robert Aaron Long murdered eight women in Atlanta in an attempt to suppress his own desire, a new circle of hell was reached. Through a series of letters, Dutch–Japanese filmmaker Kiriko Mechanichus addresses the killer directly. Why?
More than a portrait of a real crime, How to Catch a Butterfly unfolds as a personal and provocative essay on desire, power, and representation. The film takes a crime as its point of departure to expose the persistence of western fantasies surrounding asian women – often perceived as submissive – and the dynamics that emerge from them.
By inscribing her own body and voice into the narrative, the filmmaker rejects this projection and asserts a subjectivity that resists homogenization. This gesture is not merely performative but critical: it confronts the tendency to dissolve singularity into a collective, consumable image.
The film operates as a field of inquiry, invoking and reconfiguring codes associated with pornography as a system for the production of desire. By exposing these categories, it reveals how certain bodies are framed, eroticized, and hierarchized according to logics that exceed the individual level.
Through multiple layers, the intersection of misogyny and racism emerges: the female body is simultaneously objectified and racialized, inscribed within a typology that limits its agency. Without seeking to explain it, the film shifts the focus to the regimes of representation that make it possible. The result is a critical work that invites the viewer to confront not only what they see, but the conditions that shape their own gaze. (Jéssica Pestana)
