Genres: queer
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I’m a fag 4 U
Inspired by the cinematography of “Truth or Dare” and “Paris is Burning,” this video is an homage to late 80s/early 90s gay culture and aesthetic. Shot in 16mm, it features co-director Vivek Shraya and two other queer dancers (Rodney Diverlus and Phil Villeneuve) reclaiming streets and sidewalks, common sites of homophobic violence, and the word “fag.” Also a creative response to the loss of queer spaces during the pandemic, we hope that this video will remind queer viewers that they aren’t alone, even when we can only connect virtually, and that our queerness–and faggotry–is beautiful and alive. Image description: A…
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Toe the Line
TOE THE LINE follows Gloria Chau, a closeted teenage hockey player. When she’s not on the ice, she’s got a guitar in her hands and a snapback on her head. Her mother Nancy, a stylish Hong Kong woman, spends sleepless nights worrying about Gloria’s failing grades. Gloria is torn between two worlds: the fun but cutthroat world of hockey where she gets to be loud and proud in her queerness, and the one at home where she’s a recluse, using music to cope with being forced into becoming someone she’s not. Underlying these tensions is a deep racial divide. She…
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Contents under Pressure
An anxious young party-goer finds love at a party, but after committing a party faux pas, is destroyed in a washing machine accident. From here, the project pivots, self-conscious and needing to recast its hero, who quickly has an existential crisis (“what’s my motivation?”). A poetic, quirky, singular meditation on identity and personal history, populated with the beautiful vistas of Atlantic Canada.
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Ever Wanting (for Margaret Chung)
Inspired by San Francisco’s first Chinese American female physician, this film envisions the euphoria and despair of Margaret Chung and her insatiable desire for women and celebrity through her forays into drugs, sapphic surgeries, and queer flights of fancy. Image description: A black-and-white archival image toned warm purple, showing a woman dancing with arms raised to the side and skirt flared out in a circle.
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Heavy Petting
A lonely young woman scrambling to fill the void left by a missing household pet forges a strange and tenuous bond with an unexpected visitor role-playing in a cat costume. When the animal returns, the visitor is discarded and returns to life of profound solitude and invisibility, which inspires a macabre test of their social obscurity.
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Gertrude & Alice in Passing
This experiment in point of view, narrative structure, and time attempts to reproduce cinematically Gertude Stein’s notion of a “continuous present.” In four rhyming shots/scenes, it suggests the development of a relationship over many years. Based on biographical details from the lives of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, with improvised performances by Jackie Burroughs and Anne Anglin.
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Wave
Tender memories of a first gay embrace, of shock and exhilaration-and disavowal-animated against the waves of a deep blue lake. This animated biography tells the story of the artists’ first encounter with another boy. This was not the way his life was planned and he hoped that this feeling would eventually pass. He waited years until he finally met someone who would change his life forever.
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Revolve
Revolve reimagines the jazz standard “All of Me” to be an assertion of femme for femme desire rather than the self effacing ballad Billie Holiday popularized. Revolve uses the pole as a conduit through time and space to make a love offering to Holiday asking “why not” love and have our full selves loved.
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Woven Account
After the artist’s own gaybashing in the Bay Area, they wondered what it would take for their story to make the news. Allegra went on to research reported instances of hate violence targeting LGBTQIA2s+ individuals in the archives of 16 local print and online newspapers. After going through nearly two years of archives – the artist discovered only 33 articles detailing individual hate crimes or stories concerning hate crimes legislation for the broader LGBTQIA2s+ community in the Bay Area. Where they could get their hands on the physical news articles detailing hate crimes, the artist spun that newsprint by hand…
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Goldstar
An intimate look at the difference between love and relationships.
