Film Categories: Politics + Policy

  • Exilic Trilogy

    “Exilic Trilogy” consists of three arthouse docudrama films from Arsalan Baraheni, the exiled Iranian-Canadian filmmaker based in Toronto. The films present a well known musician, a painter and a poet. The films are biographical, poetic and musical, colliding with social, political and philosophical manifestations. The first film is called “Light and Sound”, starring Soleyman Vaseghi, a well known Iranian musician who was forced to leave Iran after the 1979 revolution when music got banned by the regime. The film is about the light within the mind of the artist and the sound which he produces through his music in exile.…

  • Pizza Roles

    This meta-porn captures our experience, as genderqueer mixed race people of color, living in Seattle during the age of diversity incorporated. Opportunities to explore meaningful differences in experience are cast aside in favor of glossy, diverse, marketing photographs as the ultimate proof of corporate status.

  • The Williamsburg Houses

    This film gazes into the architecture and lives of the occupants of one of the most ambitious public housing projects ever built in the US. Exploring the remains of a utopian design in contemporary context, we are immersed in the life of a building and a community.

  • Schèmes Arbitraires

    Four choreographies in a continuous narrative working through themes of struggle and beginning within conformity and control. Five Dancers as part of a larger group of dancers, and then exploring freely in the past before being moved into the conformity space, finally they are allowed periods for competition and then play both of which inevitably reinforce, and lead them back towards, the conformity space. This project is very much a collaboration between most notably Gelymar Sanchez, a montreal choreographer, Sebastien Lavoie, an Oxford experimental musician, and Sean C Dwyer, an actor and filmmaker. Each of them have had interesting, exciting…

  • Cruising Elsewhere

    Whatever happened to Wohler Beach? Oral histories and spectral pornography resurrect memories of a once legendary gay beach. “Cruising Elsewhere” won the Jury Award for Best Short Film at the 2017 Tampa Bay International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. “CRUISING ELSEWHERE is a formally daring – and thoroughly embodied – exploration of gay desire and the utopian possibility of that desire existing unabashedly in public.” – Jules Rosskam

  • 8401

    8401 is a moving-image and light landscape painting depicting a multi-layered, fragmented view of Villa Grimaldi in Santiago, Chile. Now a memorial park, Villa Grimaldi was a clandestine detention, torture and extermination centre during the Pinochet regime (1973-90). The image is built of hundreds of images extracted from five years of Google Street Views of the address and site, Avenida José Arrieta 8401.The sound is composed of fifteen audio loops of ambient sound and voice, deconstructed from a field recording gathered during a 2016 tour of the facility. A multitude of shifting perspectives give the impression both of deprioritizing time…

  • Potamkin

    In 1933, at age 33, Harry Alan Potamkin died of complications related to starvation, at a time when he was one of the world’s most respected film critics. In his writings, he advocated for a cinema that would simultaneously embrace the fractures and polyphony of modern life and the equitable social vision of left radical politics. This film-biography is assembled out of distorted fragments of films on which he had written, an impression of erupting consciousness. At the Odessa steps, trampling gives breath to the child. The bullet miraculously reforms the face. The Cossacks march backwards, retreating unseen into their…

  • Final News Report

    In this film, one evening’s TV news broadcast from an American channel is juxtaposed with the soundtrack of daily game shows, commercial messages and other found sounds from television viewing. How and what events get capsulated into the 30-second clip? What are the messages of such reductions? Certain themes of militarism, arms use, and the deployment of new weapons recur as symbols of American manhood and popular culture. The film suggests that the choice of news events and the way they are reported reveals more than mere facts. This reductive process necessarily contains the hidden ideology of our times, how…

  • 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…