Film Categories: Identity

  • Looking for Jiro

    “Looking for Jiro” explores the hidden dimensions of same sex intimacy for Japanese Americans incarcerated by the US government during World War II. This experimental performance video is inspired by Jiro Onuma, a gay Issei (immigrant) who was imprisoned at Topaz concentration camp in central Utah. He worked in the prison mess hall and was also an avid fan of homoerotic male physique magazines. How did this dandy gay bachelor from San Francisco survive the isolation, humiliation, and homophobia of imprisonment? This queer musical mash-up video features drag king performance, US propaganda footage, muscle building, and homoerotic bread making. This…

  • Sex, Politics & Sticky Rice

    Protests, potlucks, and three-ways are just the “tip of the rice bowl” for five Asian American lesbians recounting their adventures in sex, love, and queer activism. They were among the first generation of out Asian Pacific Islander queer activists in the San Francisco Bay Area. While Crystal Jang falls hard for her PE teacher, Gisele Pohan’s immigrant father dares her to join the 1979 Gay & Lesbian March on Washington. Helen Zia and Lia Shigemura keep a “chart” of the various hook ups and break ups. Zee Wong discovers the joys of lesbian sex in her first girl-on-girl menage a…

  • Warning Shot

    One death. Three versions of the crime. James H. Wakasa, a 63-year-old Japanese American bachelor, was shot to death by military police at Topaz concentration camp during World War II. Was it justifiable homicide, an accidental fatality, or second-degree murder? The press said he was trying to escape, the shooter claimed it was a warning shot, the case file suggests he was killed while walking a dog. This experimental film essay uses the “Rashomon effect” to juxtapose the conflicting accounts detailing the circumstances and cause of Wakasa’s untimely death. Part of the Queer Camp Trilogy.

  • Semiotics of Sab

    This experimental film essay explores the poetics of identity through an oblique portrait of gay Japanese American actor Sab Shimono. For more than five decades, Shimono has performed on stage and screen in over 150 roles as warlords, bus boys, and businessmen. Shimono asks, “How is it that we know who we are?” Recalling early structuralist works by Hollis Frampton and Martha Rosler, Semiotics of Sab displays the grammatology of queer Asian American masculinity through conflicting lexicons of race, representation, and selfhood.

  • Plus One

    The singles table at a wedding is rarely a place anyone stays a moment longer than they have to, but Trish and Calvin have their reasons: she doesn’t want to run into an army of ex-girlfriends, and he’s depressed at the lack of eligible men among the wedding attendees. Their mutual misery forces a bond, and the two strangers quickly become allies in dance floor avoidance. A comic and highly contemporary exploration of thirtysomething singledom, Plus One offers up an all-too-rare romance where queer boy meets queer girl.

  • Love Letter Rescue Squad

    “Our history was disappearing as quickly as we were making it.” With that realization, Deborah Edel and Joan Nestle co-founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the world’s largest collection of materials by and about lesbians. More than 40 years later, Deb must consider the future of the collection.

  • Traje de Luces | Suit of Lights

    Traje de Luces | Suit of Lights is an expressive documentary composed with footage of a Spanish bullfight, that iconic imagery of highly decorated masculinity and violence masked as nationalism. The footage was drawn from Jacques Madvo Collection material filmed in Spain between 1976-1978. Madvo shot this footage at a time when Spain began its difficult and flawed transition to democracy in the years following dictator Francisco Franco’s death in 1975. The film consists of 16mm footage that has been decayed in soil, contact-printed and laboriously re-photographed and these abstractions of light and darkness ground the inquiry surrounding why citizens…

  • Missed Connections

    Two strangers meet and form a bond at a festival, but they forget to exchange contact info. As they search for one another in the real world, their posts go viral, as they navigate their careers, lives, and societyʼs expectations of them as Black, female, and transgender. LGBT love story. Audience Award for Best Short, TranScreen Amsterdam Transgender Film Festival, 2019

  • Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots

    Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots reworks Jacques Madvo’s Countries & People: Venezuela to explore labour and migration. Taking the final words of the film’s voice-over as a starting point, Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots pairs Madvo’s film footage with a text-based conversation with young Venezuelan literature scholar and language teacher Angel Said Dominguez Pinto. Dominguez Pinto relocated to Panama in 2014 to make a living teaching English, Spanish & German in Panama City after Venezuela’s economic collapse. Over e-mail, we co-authored a conversational text, exploring migration,…

  • It’s Not Me, It’s An Image Of Me

    To make an object based on a photograph means adding dimensions such as space, time and continuity. Roasting skewers, hairpins and nails were the tools of self-liberation in the photo series Zerstörung einer Illusion (‘Destruction of an Illusion’) by Karin Mack, which was produced in 1977 with a self-timer and her hand processing work in the darkroom. Forty years after its creation, it is a new perspective that transforms and sets into motion the examination of the self-image and role as a woman into a three-dimensional object. Light and rotation create an illusory horizon of perception inherent in filmmaking and…