Miranda July’s Kajillionaire (2020, USA) and queer utopias

Miranda July is a compelling, individual voice in contemporary screen culture and her filmmaking practice challenges how a filmmaker, working within an industrial production process, can maintain their own voice. July is a filmmaker, artist and writer whose creative work spans film, video, writing, acting, performance, music, conceptual art and app development. Along with a growing body of short films, July has written and directed three feature films. With each film, she has continued to subvert and push the boundaries of the screen form. July’s most recent film, Kajillionaire ( 2020 ), tells the story of 26-year-old Old Dolio, the daughter in a family of scammers, and it has been described as ‘an original heist film’. However, the story that Kajillionaire tells is more than just a genre film, continuing July’s interest in marginal characters who live on the fringes of society, raising questions about families, cultural expectations and the search for human connection. It is also a film in which we can see July creating images that break through a dominant regime of cinematic cliches. This article examines Kajillionaire and its evolving script through a queer lens, framing this analysis through the work of Jose Munoz and Sarah Ahmed and the questions they pose about ‘queer utopias’ and ‘the cultural construction of happiness’.

Keywords: alternative screen production ; feature film ; Jose Muñoz ; Kajillionaire ; Miranda July ; queer film ; queer utopias ; Sarah Ahmed