Film Categories: (De)colonization

我的女儿 DAUGHTER

DAUGHTER explores an immigrant mother’s pain and worry about her transgender daughter and examines the perspective of a mother who may not understand her daughter, but cares for her deeply. The film celebrates transgender resistance, gender non-normativity, and the strength of the immigrant family across language and cultural boundaries.
This Is A Safe Space

It’s 2017 and the world is young, hip, and blindly woke. The tech world is teeming with ground-breaking ideas, the office kitchens are stocked with world class snacks, the offices industrial and modern, and the employees are liberal. This office is not exempt and in this world, socially correct buzzwords carry more weight than actions. Taraja, a cool and collected executive and Ashlynn, an upbeat, outspoken receptionist have decided that they have had enough. Enough of the comments, enough of the questions, and most of all enough of people touching their hair. As their day progresses, CEO and self-aligned ally…
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…
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…
Wayward Emulsions

Fleeting cinematic impressions of a wayward woman are captured in the oblique wanderings of emulsion lifted from stray reels of 35mm film. Winner, Experimental Short Grand Jury Prize, Slamdance Festival 2019
Sworded Love

Fleeting cinematic impressions of star-crossed swordsmen are captured in the oblique wanderings of emulsion lifted from a stray reel of a 35mm kung fu action film.
Lift Little Tokyo

Maps and memories of Little Tokyo’s historical district of Los Angeles are uplifted via scotch tape transfers.
The Bed and the Street

A love story set in the global anti-austerity demonstrations. As citizens take back their streets, two women meet and fall in love. What geometry of desire will help overthrow the state? What micro-politics of sharing and communality will provide fuel for demonstrations that will remove and replace the neo-liberal consensus? Cast in a palimpsest of images and sounds, as if there were no way to separate inside and out, the street and the bedroom.
Daily Bread

In a WWII internment camp in Indonesia, Jeanne and a group of Dutch women and children face a daily struggle against abuse, disease, and starvation. Meanwhile, the Camp Commandant’s beloved white fluffy cat is fed fresh juicy meat….
M3RM41D

based on past research to find gender radicalism in the wild, this rock was !discovered! with a moderately blown-out tri-colour weave and wearing a mad decent lipstick. I danced with it for a few minutes before i realized it wouldn’t be able to survive outside of its natural habitat, thus i released it back into the wild.