As we wind down from last month’s SXSW 2025 and head into summer film festival season, we’re revisiting some of our favorite screenings from this year’s event — all directed and led by Asian women (some for the first time!) with powerful perspectives.
“Forever We Are Young”
Directed by Patty Ahn and Grace Lee, “Forever We Are Young” is a documentary that follows K-pop boy group BTS’s fandom, known as ARMY, which stands for Adorable Representative MC for Youth. To be clear, it’s not a film about BTS, but the band’s fans.
“Through personal stories of ARMY, you get to know how BTS and ARMY evolved over the last 10 years,” Lee describes in an ATX Film Talks event hosted by AZN AMERICANA and Asian Pacific Filmmakers Experience. “In the last decade, [BTS] went from an unknown company to global icons, and how did that happen? [That’s] the question we ask in the movie.” In the post-screening Q&A, she adds, “Looking around the audience at a BTS concert made [me] question, who are these people? How did they get here?”
From the very start, Ahn and Lee emphasize that they are both OT7, which is fanspeak for loving all seven members of the group. This film is truly by fans, for fans. Both separately attended the same “Permission to Dance on Stage” tour stop in 2022, but found each other through mutual connections. Their collaboration flourished from there.
“For me, it’s like, there’s life before seeing BTS live, and life after seeing BTS live. After I saw BTS live, I thought, this is something that cannot be described in words,” Ahn expresses.
“Forever We Are Young” tells the stories of several ARMY members around the world as a way to describe the whole. We hear from journalists and scholars and fans from the Midwest United States to Korea.
As these fans introduce their bias (fanspeak for their favorite), we get to learn about the group through their eyes. While my mind often goes to parasocial relationships, there’s…
Read the full article here
