Film Categories: Anthropology

  • Looking For Carmen

    “In his most ravishing and heartbreaking work, Arriaga ventures again to his native Peru in search of a lost friend. Along the way he encounters the faces of those who speak about wounds that cannot heal—survivors recounting the deaths and disappearances of their beloveds during Peru’s civil war that pitted the communists of The Shining Path against the government, with both sides aligned against the people. “The dead have called us to find them,” remarks Lida Flores de Huaman, and Marcos follows her evocation, cutting memory trails into Peru that bring back the names of the disappeared. Using frames that…

  • camera settings

    exploring surveillance documents, the idea of leaked sex-tapes, hidden camera and sexual obsession

  • Drag Race

    A public three-event race in high heels and improvised monologue about all things political from pro-choice philosophies, the glass ceiling, the history of high heels, vandalism and gentrification, buying locally and seasonally, going vegan, sexual health and gender diversity. Participation was highly encouraged and pre-race makeovers were often held at my apartment. This is a document of the 10th annual drag race.

  • HOSER

    This video was constructed in response to my experience of sexual assault and linked to the data collection/research I was doing shortly thereafter in publicly accessible community discourses of sero-conversion (pozzing) fetish, which have since received some scholarly attention in the Academy in the Social Sciences in relation to HIV acquisition/prevention and Queer theory. This tape is a reflection upon ideas of disclosure, self-determination, self-loathing, and informal support networks.

  • Porn Yesterday

    Queer people remember their first experiences with porn.

  • Topology of a String

    Topology of A String is a video installation of seven looping videos that investigate permutations and possibilities of a single continuous line in space. Without ever breaking the line, hundreds of variant forms can be created by weaving the string over and under fingers, across the palms or backs of the hands. This project links string games, an ancient form of entertainment shared by cultures the world over, to the branch of mathematics called topology. Each sequence starts at the same opening position yet a single change in the over-under pattern results in a completely different form. The near infinite…

  • Doing and undoing: poems from within #1 radiotherapy

    It deals with interventions that I had made with my mother during her cancer treatment. The film is part of large project dealing with my mother’s cancer healing process. Hacer y Deshacer: Poems from Within (2019) is an interactive video installation. Most of the video sequences show Gelis’s mother undressing, one strand of yarn at a time, sometimes in Panama’s Casco Viejo (historic district), sometimes in the turbulent waters of the Pacific. Using her mother’s body, she tells the story of a cancer survivor, the story of countless others. Gelis invites us into the healing process: the viewer can change…

  • Island Story

    “I know nothing about the filmmaker, but with a short film as odd and strangely poignant as this one, the mystery makes it all the better. The blindingly and like a Martian horizon, the sun plays with the viewer’s stability. A narrator gives the account of a strange tale of a couple on a transformative journey into a world of paradise with no language. Animalistic gesticulations and instinctive expression emanate from the body until both of them grow apart and then into other versions of themselves, never to be the same again. A grainy vintage-like feel permeates the alien world…

  • (tourism studies)

    Sometimes it’s not until the project is finished that I begin to know what the project is about. I’d been sifting through this footage: travel movies, home movies, fragments from projects that never became more than that. It was the summer of 2018 that I began assembling these parts, working intuitively, letting the process guide me and I began to realize that I’d made a Rorschach test for myself, a formalist self-portrait of my Belgian-Japanese-American-Jew heritage and a personal emotional journey following my mother’s passing, my father’s remarriage, and Emma having my child. January 2019 while shooting in Hong Kong,…

  • ARTIFACT (circa 2006)

    The archaeology of Identity. Consider a world where all human communications are represented by numbers, a digital world. Imagine a future archaeologist finding a DV cassette from hundreds of years ago (a real found object, circa 2006, full length and uncut). Imagine trying to decode this ancient digital object, codecs unknown, obsolete, hardware long lost. Crack the code? Available algorithms scan, databases compare, construct, deconstruct, reconstruct the artifact. 2006, the dawn of self-by-numbers, digitized identity. What human fragments, fugitive narratives, remain? Do we have a future history? What will the algorithms decide? All bookings of this film include a free…