Film Categories: Work about Women

  • 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.

  • Primary Colours

    A cine-poem by Sudanese-Canadian artist Roua Aljied, aka Philosi-fire, about the realities of domestic violence and how each step a woman takes is a new colour to paint on the canvass of her life. Created in partnership with Women in International Security Canada and the 16 Days of Activism Campaign in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and performed live for the 2016 International Women’s Day ceremonies in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

  • 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.

  • Parker

    A couple gets into a tiff on the way home from a social event, that is only resolved when they realize they were both behaving out of mis-placed jealousy.

  • 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

  • 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…

  • this year, here

    A contemplation on queer histories, explored through memories of a family cottage.

  • Sophie’s Letter

    During the composition of the letter to her abusive father, Sophie identifies with her inner wounded child (Little Sophie) and gradually finds what she needs to grow beyond the limits and boundaries that were burned into her psyche so many years earlier.