Film Categories: Identity

  • Silvia in the Waves / Silvia dans les vagues

    Noa struggles to honor the identity of his recently deceased parent while his mother tries to uphold the appearance of a conventional family. Grief and fantasy entwine to reveal the complex relationship between history and erasure, identity and memory.

  • BLU In YOU

    Walter Benjamin suggests that film is comparable to surgery, the instrument allowing the operator to penetrate the body of the subject while, paradoxically, maintaining his or her distance. This statement self-reflexively sets up the female spectator at the helm of the art-installation opening of Blu in You—an eloquent essayist film with visual conversations that dissects historical and contemporary representations of the black female body, sexuality and subjectivity. The female spectator (Melanie Smith), views the staged art installation conversations between visual arts curator (Andrea Fatona) and writer (Nalo Hopkinson). The conversations begin with a cultural history of violence, ethnographic display and…

  • 16 Reasons Why I Hate Myself

    Matthew Lancit’s 16 Reasons Why I Hate Myself wryly plays with the concept of selfhood, traversing themes such as neuroticism, introspection and self-denigration. By allowing us an intimate look at sixteen of his supposed personal flaws from the physical to the psychological, Lancit posits the idea that we do not determine our identities but rather they determine us. (Sullivan+Strumpf Gallery)

  • Protector

    “Protector” is the first in a series of short documentaries that explores Osborne’s relationship with their uncle/godfather and his experiences with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), institutionalization, and working in Mental Health.”Protector” attempts to portray a person living with DID in an authentic and multi-faceted way. This documentary was funded by the Ontario Arts Council.

  • Framing Agnes (short)

    In the late 1950s, a woman named Agnes approached the UCLA Medical Center seeking sex reassignment surgery. Her story was long considered to be exceptional and singular until never-before-seen case files of other patients were found in 2017. Watch as preeminent trans culture-makers of our time breathe new life into those who redefined gender in the midcentury. Starring Zackary Drucker (Transparent), Angelica Ross (Pose), Silas Howard (By Hook or By Crook), and Max Wolf Valerio (The Testosterone Files). “An incredible film that transforms the most difficult of archives and shows us critical trans study in action, on screen—I will be…

  • The Shallow End

    Christian, a 20-yr-old swim teacher, is having a hard time recovering from an incident where one of his students almost drowns on his watch.

  • Cold Hands

    In an effort to make friends in high school, Lucas finds himself in a position that compromises his safety. In the aftermath, he realizes that the support he seeks is not guaranteed.

  • Small Fish

    Laurie is an artist who wants nothing more than to become a professional painter. She paints beautiful fish but when her paintings don’t sell she is overwhelmed by the rejection and the feeling that she will never be successful. Losing her sense of self and artistic voice, this is when things get fishy. With the help of a fellow artist, she tries to find her way through this vast ocean too big for such a small fish.

  • On the Line

    “On the Line” is inspired by Isa Shimoda, a butch gender nonconforming immigrant who served meals to Japanese American tuna cannery workers in her restaurant on the docks of San Diego in the 1930s. She was known for her masculine attire as well as her skills at naginata, a sword-based martial art practiced by Japanese women. Her restaurant was a refuge for the women who endured gruesome hours cleaning fish and lived in meager housing shelters known as “fish camp.” Shimoda has two sets of wartime records from the incarceration camps—one identifying her as female, the other as male. “On the Line” uses…