July Screening
Untitled by Nguyen Anh Tu Pham
A series of my thoughts.
Nguyen Anh Tu Pham is queer a Vietnamese filmmaker living in Sài Gòn and curently running a small cinema called Đéo.
June 2019
June Screening
*This film is distributed by The Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center and was only available to view for the month of June 2019 on Queer Moving Image.
Fluids by Rob Fatal
6 years ago two artists attempted to make a queer, sci-fi porno: it failed. What emerged 6 years later out of its campy/tragic/melodramatic ashes is this erotic experimental documentary; a meditation on the intersections of failure and fetish as well the meticulous, accidental processes of constructing of cinema and identity.
*This film contains nudity and graphic sexuality
F Movie Productions presents…
♢ FLUIDS ♢
A Rob Fatal film
Produced by Rob Fatal & Coral Aorta
Written, directed, shot and edited by Rob Fatal
Starring Coral Aorta and Jeremy Daniels
Rob Fatal is a video, photo and performance artist concerned with the Queer archive and exploring decolonial aesthetics. Fatal has been awarded grants by the Berkeley Film Foundation, Queer Cultural Center and SOMArts Cultural Center. Their work has been screened internationally at the British Film Institute Flare Festival, Fringe! Queer Film & Art Festival in London, Frameline SF LGBTQ Film Festival, Galeria de la Raza San Francisco, Toronto Queer Film Festival, Geneva LGBT Film Festival and First Nations Film Festival in Chicago. As a Native American, Latinx and queer artist, Fatal finds community and culture to be their greatest artistic inspiration. To create with the collective minds of unique individuals is a practice that brings to them a great spiritual catharsis; a feeling of joy and power tied to the realization of what people working together can accomplish when in harmony: a home, a shared reality, justice, and healing.
Fatal’s films are distributed by Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center.
May 2019
May Screening
Reality Fragment 160921 by Qigemu
Our own histories are always under curation, and as such, our perspectives become the central point in the building of personal realities. How do these multiple lived worlds, each their own amalgamation of memories, sensations, thoughts, coexist with de facto presentations of distance, history, and totality? How is this coexistence mediated if one is an actor in the online realm? The Internet functions as yet another parallel universe, but likewise an explicit symbol of the traversing between the subjective and the objective — a symbol in the questioning of solitary truths.
Reality Fragment 160921 follows two people in their process of reality-curation, as they create their own spaces against and via understandings of distance, as they go through the motions of growing themselves by growing their universes. We witness not only their movements, but also partake in the thoughts of two witnesses and how by seeing these two people, worlds are merged. In turn, we ask you, a viewer of this film and thus also a witness, to pay attention to your own movements of perception and reflect around the ways in which you build your own world. Who have you merged your world with, and what does that mean for the subjective truths you tend to?
Reality Fragment 160921 is Qigemu’s debut film. Using footage they collected during a summer together, they decided to create a film, writing and editing through Skype calls between Los Angeles and Stockholm. Thus, the piece simultaneously materializes this iterative process of reflection as well as its result. Due to its organic conception, Reality Fragment 160921 transcends the boundaries of distinct genres, encompassing docu-fiction, experimental narrative, and video art in its structural form and use of aesthetic storytelling mechanisms.
七个木 Qigemu 七個木 is a duo consisting of lovers April Lin and Jasmine Lin exploring the interstices of movement, visual media, identity, and the global Asian diaspora as respectively, Chinese-Swedish and Taiwanese-American. Using the potential of this hybrid space, Qigemu engages in conversations dealing with bodies, information, and energies, and how these are conceptualized in the Internet Age. A central element of Qigemu’s creative process is learning to understand the growth of their relationship and of themselves, and no endeavor that is embarked on, whether analytical, emotional, or spiritual, is impersonal nor detached. Qigemu is committed to broadening what it means to be queer and Asian, constructing alternative narratives of subversive existence grounded in un-learning and un-teaching exclusionary ways of movement and existence.
April 2019
April Screening
Scene by Eloise Sherrid
“Scene” is an exploration of trust, intimacy and laughter through rope bondage. The film describes a power exchange outside of cis and straight expectations; instead of catering to the audience’s gaze, the film centers the sensations and stream-of-consciousness of the participants. The film also questions the implications of introducing a camera to the scene, wondering whether the act of recording is inherently voyeuristic, or if the same principles of consent negotiated in the scene can also be applied to the filmmaker and viewer.
Eloise Sherrid is an NYC based filmmaker, multimedia artist and educator. Her work explores the intersection, mechanics, and deconstruction of power, politics and narrative. Her short viral documentary “The Room of Silence,” examined racial marginalization in art schools, and has screened at universities and conferences all over the world, including SAIC, MICA, and MassArt. She has been featured by DRØME Magazine, Bad at Sports, the Anthology Film Archives, and the Rhode Island International Film Festival. She works as a freelance cinematographer and teaching artist, and holds a BFA from RISD.
March Screening 2019
March Screening
Beautiful Noise by Henry Davis
In my practice I like to concentrate on the unsaid, the cataclysmic and the domestic. Examining the liminal and subversive I uncover strict silent codes and my work serves to tease out the dichotomy between safe public environments and private, intimate experiences. For the project Beautiful Noise I returned to my family home. I stripped the dwelling of all contents leaving only main pieces of furniture. Constantly changing perspectives sometimes forces a child’s point of view. The focus is on what normally lies unseen and hidden; the underside of the dining room table, dust, a forgotten nail. These tangible, uncovered ‘pieces of evidence’ are not the whole story and I like to think of them as markers to point to that which cannot been seen or touched. The films climax is not really an ending at all as a sense of ongoing surveillance, of unfinished business prevails. The films are scrutinising the elements of home as an empty setting, they are meditations on absence, loss and (just) after. Adding to the uncanny familiarity and (dis)quiet the audio is restrained to a few exterior sounds exclusive to this dwelling. Being simultaneously nostalgic and definitive to present day visits they conflate past with present and for all their forensic precision the films convey both expectation and loss. A sense that something is about to happen prevails as does the feeling that they are remanence, evidence of enduring yet absent energy .
Henry Davis (born 1970) works out of a studio in New Cross, South East London, Uk. He uses film and sculpture to examine how identity is constructed through biographical and cultural influences. Inferring and referencing the repressed and subconscious his practice sits in a liminal space between authenticity and facade, reality and fantasy.
February 2019
February Screening
Them (or Things My Ex-Boyfriends Have Actually Said To Me) By Jamie Janković
The non-linear narrative of this experimental ‘docudrama’ follows the filmmaker (Jamie) performing a re-enactment of their time in an abusive relationship, viewed from the POV of their abuser, friends and loved ones. Each of these characters view a different construction of Jamie: Jamie as a sex object, Jamie pretending to be in a happy relationship, and Jamie verbally, physically and mentally affected by the abuser and events of the relationship. The film shifts the visual focus away from the abuser and focuses on the victim for the entire duration of the film, allowing the audience to directly observe the ramifications and effects of abuse.
Jamie Janković is a trans artist filmmaker born in Plymouth, England in 1995, now living in London and currently enrolled on the Experimental Film MA at Kingston University. They graduated from Kingston University in 2017 with a BA in Media & Communication and Sociology and for this reason their research interests focus on interrogating various social issues, specifically examining: social constructs, representation in media, gender performance and stereotypes, visual culture and the relationship between the authentic and constructed self. Their practice revolves around presenting their findings as an experimental audio-visual experience, acting as an educational yet accessible and engaging alternative to essay writing and academia, with the primary aim of raising awareness of the under or misrepresented.
January Screening
January Screening
TRANS:formation by Mariam Magsi
Documenting a member of the Trans community of Toronto, Canada, while discussing themes related to gender, sexuality and identity.
Mariam Magsi: Multidisciplinary Artist with an MFA from OCAD University in Art, Media & Design.
December Screening 2018
December Screening
Lulu’s Journal by Jose Luis Benavides
Through a collection of episodic journal entries and poetic investigations, the voice of the young artist Amanda Cervantes reenacts the queer, Latina youth of Lourdes Benavides aka Lulu, my mother. Drawn from a larger experimental documentary project called Lulu en el Jardín, this video-poem divulges previously untold aspects of my mother’s experiences and story. I imagine here my mom writing while being institutionalized at Chicago-Read Mental Health Center when she was a teenager in the mid 1970s. Rather than embody her voice these passages reflect an interior, psychological landscape, a private place of reflection and consciousness muted by the institution and the insidious powers of homophobic and patriarchal Western culture. Credits: Written and Directed by Jose Luis Benavides Performance by Amanda Cervantes Work cited: Anne Furse, Augustine (Big Hysteria), 1997
Jose Luis Benavides (b. 1986 Chicago, IL) is a queer Latinx artist, filmmaker and educator. His works focus on issues of historicity, social narratives and voice. His work often merges an in-depth archival practice and an intensive research-based practice with poetry, video and theoretical investigation. He recently held his first solo show at Terremoto in Mexico City (2018). He was recently awarded the Mamarrat (Paths) Artist Residency for Qalandiya Internatonal (2018). His work has screened at The Nightingale (2017); Links Hall (2016) and as part of festivals including Collected Voices (2018); 2nd Floor Rear Festival (2017); and S2F2: Scored Silent Film Festival (2013). He has performed under the moniker luigi and as himself at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts (2018); 65GRAND (2018); Elastic Arts (2017); and Terrain Biennial (2017). He received an MFA from University of Illinois at Chicago in 2017.
November Screening
November Screening
All Alone Before Frozen Gods by Elizabeth Vazquez
We drive through an unconcerned landscape. analogue transmutations briefly engage our distracted memories. there is no signal here. there is some here. thoughts are carelessly misplaced along the way. we don’t need them anyway…gotta stop. gotta stop. gotta stop…even our piss is arid. we keep driving. everyone is alone now. some of us are asleep. an untucked republican with a fully loaded erection approaches us: “do you ever dream en español?” he sure asks a whole lotta questions. in the distance a jagged boulder mingles with the stars. “how much longer must we make meaning?” “it doesn’t matter, the myth is dead.” we get to the border and kick dirt into each other’s eyes. “Your America is a beautiful, dangerous lie.”
When Elizabeth T. Vazquez isn’t making bad decisions, they try to make things that their parents will not understand. They currently live in Los Angeles and still talk about chemtrails.
Queer Moving Image Review 