Film Categories: Portraits

  • Queer Camp Trilogy

    The Queer Camp Trilogy is a series of experimental films exploring the hidden dimensions of queer Japanese American wartime history. This trilogy, made up of Looking For Jiro (2011), Warning Shot (2016), and On the Line (2018), was inspired by first-generation Japanese Americans who were incarcerated by the US government during World War II. These subjects left subtle yet discernible traces of same-sex intimacy or gender nonconformity in the archive, despite the enormous pressure put upon Japanese Americans to accept their imprisonment quietly, prove their patriotic loyalty, and smile for Ansel Adams during their unlawful imprisonment. I approached their enigmatic…

  • Misadventures of Pussy Boy Trilogy

    “Misadventures of Pussy Boy” is trilogy of short videos subtitled “First Love”, “Sick” and “First Period”, each video’s running time is approximately 6 minutes, all videos are animated in a fashion that is very much “do-it-yourself” aesthetic, as told from the point of view of a transgendered youth in rural Cape Breton. Each video was animated by hand, the backgrounds were created like theatre back drops, with the characters hand painted and cut out, performing each scene in front of the matching background for the scene. Camera work involved shooting each shot for 3-5 seconds and then manipulating the characters…

  • First Period

    “First Period”, the third video in the “Misadventures of Pussy Boy” trilogy, the title is a double entendre for the first period of school and Alick’s first menstrual cycle, a shocking event that sends our intersexed youth into an emotional tailspin. Alick is worried about how Kay will react, will she have anything to do with this “?”. Their burgeoning secret relationship is threatened by Kay’s friendship with Ray, the high school bad boy. Alick also relates how he acquired the name “pussy boy”. Alick learns his lessons well from his first love Kay and turns a bully’s taunt into…

  • Audrey’s Beard

    “Audrey’s Beard” was shot on my beloved Bolex camera. The film was conceived as a time-lapse documentary film experiment with shots of this once butch dyke filmmaker’s beard growing in over a 21-day period in the early 1990’s. At the time it felt like it was a very transgressive act as an artist, transitioning gender, to grow the beard I had felt ashamed of for so many years, using my body to tell a story, coming to terms with the shame of being born Intersex in a creative and empowering way. Ten years later, in 2001, a potent voice over…

  • A Day With My Family

    Some video segments of a day with my family at the farm. At editing, I had fun doing something more meaningful. The message of this film is: family, love, friendship are important things in life.

  • Fiori Della Mia Vita (flowers of my life)

    Fiori Della Mia Vita is a memorial to lost love that is based on the true love story of my mentor Gianpaolo Barbieri and his partner Evar, who died a quarter of century ago. GPB + EVAR

  • The Astronauts’ Bodies

    When his two mature children Anton and Linda start leaving the house, after graduating from school, father Michael stops taking care of his body as a protest. His son Anton takes part in a bed-rest-study to contribute to space-traveling, while his sister Linda is in search of her first sexual experience and is drawn to a suspicious young man. The film is a poetic story about the progression of dreams to go to space and about the organic beauty of the human body, its desires and longings.

  • May 35

    A haunting commemoration of the Tiananmen Square uprisings made from fragments of censored archival imagery transferred onto film using razor blades and scotch tape. “May 35” speaks to the difficulty of remembering in the absence of memory, especially when June 4 histories have been censored and obscured. It is a tribute to the thousands of lives devastated by this upheaval. Sound Design: Kadet Kuhne

  • Another Day in America

    This film profiles three Japanese women artists. Monterey-born Grace Munakata works with abstract collages which evoke an attempt to locate her family’s past, especially her parents’ lives in internment camps. Japanese-born Rumi Sakata has worked for the past twenty years as a traditional brush painter. Her life celebrates freedom and individuality within her own traditional mode of artistic achievement. The third artist, Jan Yonemoto, fronts a Jazz fusion quintet, Crosswinds. Her musical artistry celebrates talent over gender.

  • Nadia’s Songs

    “Nadia’s Songs” follows a teenage boy who finds a collection of CDs that used to belong to a stranger known only as Nadia. In their shared taste in music he imagines her life story while in turn reflecting on his own. One part essay and one part love letter to second-hand music shops, “Nadia’s Songs” explores the many ways we can forge our identities through the art we consume and things we collect as young adults.