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MONDAY, MAY 10

Part 2
Guest Curated Programs
1970's, 80's, 90's

Film Theatre
Lower Level
Regina Public Library
2311 12th Ave.

(see May 3 for introduction)

7 PM

1990's

THE UNTELEVISED REVOLUTION
Curated by Shari Frilot

The 1990's was an explosive decade in the evolution of queer identity in the world. It was the decade that saw the rise of 'New Queer Cinema.' in local movie houses, of 'Lesbian Chic' splashed on the cover of national magazines, and the newly dubbed 'Gay Market' flexing its way into advertising campaigns. The 90's also saw a massive and defining eruption of daring experimental filmmaking by a new wave of queer filmmakers of color who were making important films about the intersections of race, class, immigration and sexuality. Not to mention, the ladies were spitting in the face of all that mainstream chic and were, for the first time, getting quite raunchy with lesbian sexuality!

The movement of queerness into the mainstream was a distinctly 1990's moment. However, this diverse community of queer filmmakers of color formed a movement that not only offered an alternative to 90's mainstream media and politics, they were destined to address and define what would be the important creative and political movements of the new millennium. This visually luscious collection of film and video work from the early to mid 90's shows off some of what was being done by these filmmakers of color who were working outside ö and without the support of ö mainstream rainbow flagged forces.


Sex Fish
(Shu Lea Cheang, USA, 1993, video, 6 min.)
A furious montage of oral sex, public rest room cruising, and ö well ö tropical fish. From the director of the cult classic, Fresh Kill (1992), and ground breaking internet art works such as Brandon (2000) and Garlic = Rich Air (2003).

Bodily Functions
(Jocelyn Taylor, USA, 1995, video, 20 min.)
The tale of a young girl's sexual evolution is backdropped by two dangerous suspects, a naked female pedestrian and a butch biker. Meanwhile, women talk about their first sexual experiences, getting caught 'in the act' and the expectations and challenges of living in a racist and heterosexist society. Taylor went on to establish herself as a gallery video installation artist.

She Don't Fade
(Cheryl Dunye, USA, 1991, video, 24 min.)
This delightful comedic short chronicles the sexual pursuits of Shae Clarke (played by Dunye) as she defines and readily demonstrates her 'new approach to women.' Dunye went on to become the first black woman to direct a second feature film Stranger Inside, 2001, destined for commercial distribution.

The Attendant
(Isaac Julian, UK, 1993, 35mm, 8 min.)
The erotic, sado-masochistic imagination of a black museum security guard is triggered by a young white gay man and a 19th-century painting of slaves in bondage. Julian went on to become one of the art worldās leading video installation artists.

I Like Dreaming
(Charles Lofton, USA, 1994, video, 7 min.)
Cruising on a subway platform. Is he straight? Or straight-acting, straight-appearing? A delicious confession about the pleasures of cruising straight men, and an insightful meditation of constructions of masculinity and sexual identity.

Via New York
(Kagendo Murungi, USA, 1995, video, 9 min.)
An exploration of New York City as the geographical site for an intersectional analysis of African lesbian and gay lives and rights, human rights and the politics of the state.

Paixao Nacional
(Karim Ainouz, Brazil/Canada, 1994, 16mm, 6 min.)
A young Brazilian man flees his country and freezes to death in the hold of an airplane bound for Europe. His dying memories of the sexual constraints he faced in his homeland are interwoven with a tourists' impression of Brazil as an oversexed paradise. Ainouz went on to direct the award-winning feature film Madame Sata (2003).

First Year
(Trac Vu, USA, 1996, video, 6 min.)
The filmmaker recalls his first experiences in America after emigrating from Vietnam, recollecting such diverse memories as the seductiveness of K-mart, paper-thin walled apartments, and the secrets of homosexuality that only library books can reveal.

9 PM

1990's

Bodies in the Street;
Queer Wars of the 90's
Curated by Ellen Flanders

1990's film and video reflected the enormous changes of a queer world rapidly moving into the 'gaystream.' But the seismic shifts were bigger than that. Globally, the Gulf war, Bosnia and Kosovo were televised daily, but on the home front the queer community was engaged in several battles of its own, some involving thousands of deaths but with little media attention. As a result, the queer community mobilized bringing the media to us and producing work that expressed our rage and angst, our truth and our reality. In the 1990's we took our bodies to the streets; with kiss-ins and die-ins, we refused to be ignored. Film and video of the 1990's includes work that acknowledged the battles that we were waging and are some of the most profound, honest works in queer film/video history.

In the dawn of the new millennium we are again in the midst of war. And yet we hardly feel it, experience it in any other way than the fleeting images on CNN or CBC. A remote, distant world is embattled and as the activism died down this year, it seemed to disappear from our horizon. I am compelled to bring it forward in the context of an historical program to acknowledge where we are still and the different ways in which we have interpreted the notion of 'war.' Perhaps the most familiar knowledge we have of war is that people die. In the 1990ās scores of our community were indeed dying and as with most wars, the media only seemed to hear the odd cry; collateral damage was what we were then as others remain so today. Nameless, faceless people, that some of us attempted to bring to life through images. The War on AIDS was perhaps the closest the homosexual community had come to interpreting loss at numbers reflective of countries at war, of soldiers killing one another and civilians. Furthermore the 90ās brought with it the Culture Wars and while drastically different from the War on AIDS, the Culture Wars were fiercely fought battles of another kind wherein activists took their cues from AIDS activism. As the dominant culture worked harder than ever to shroud the emerging image of the queer, to seal our lips and put us in jail for sexual expression and sexuality in general, we reared our heads and fought back. We exposed ourselves flagrantly in the streets often inviting violence for our in-your-face actions. We produced work that addressed the cultural silencing, and often did so with impunity becoming more explicit defining that which defied the court rulings. And as we became more public, violence against queers also mounted. And here too we fought back with street patrols where queer bashing might occur and video and film works as testaments to the violence. Finally, the last place in which battles were waged although perhaps more subtle, reside in both our image of war and its fetishization. While we drew the connections between real embattled ground, we also adhered to our queerness, our campness that had room for hung sailors or women pilots. For without drag and masquerade we are but merely unknown soldiers, queers slipping hopelessly into the mainstream.

War is now and war was then and queer film and video of the 90's rallied battle cries from across the queer map to screens across nations. And the war plays on . . .


Day of Desperation
(NPR Report, USA, 1991, video, 4 min.)
An Audio piece from America's National Public Radio interviewing an Act-Up activist who with a few others friends interrupted Dan Rather's CBS Nightly News Coverage on the Gulf War. Racing in front of the cameras, the activists shout: Fight AIDS not Arabs! Act-up showed an acute awareness at the time that their war was aligned with the global economy and the larger military industrial complex.

Nation
(Tom Kalin, USA, 1991, video, 1 min.)
Reminds us that our bodies, like land, have been shaped by history into a series of zones to be charted, conquered, divided or made whole.

Kissing Doesn't Kill
(Tom Kalin, USA, 1992, video, 4 min.)
Hip, up-beat safe sex announcements that became infamous on buses, t-shirts and as PSA's. But more than just ads for safe sex, Kalin puts queers in the public-eye pulling us from the shadows to the bright light.

Mash Notes for Private Kyle Brown
(Michael Achtman, Canada, 1997, video, 10 min.)
Based on a poem by RM Vaughan about the torture and beating to death of a Somali teenager by members of the Canadian Airborne Regiment, Mash Notes examines individual responsibility versus systematic corruption and the homophobic and racist elements central to the military enterprise. And of course not to miss: RM's appearance stroking a large gun . . .

October 25+26, 1996
(Kika Thorne, Canada, 1996, video, 8 min.)
Kika Thorne reminds us of the beauty of activism in the making and then the remaking through the documentation of the October Group's action wherein they inflated a 150' long building using air vents in front of Toronto's City Hall during the Metro Days of Action. The Īair-buildingā was both built and destroyed in protest of the erosion of the city and those within it.

Internal Combustion
(Cynthia Madansky, USA, video, 7:30 min.)
Breaking the many silences surrounding lesbians and AIDS, Madansky weaves her voice with that of an HIV+ Latina Lesbian friends' and a beautiful collage of images to carefully construct their very different subject positions yet overlapping experiences of survival and power, mourning and loss.

Anthem
(Marlon Riggs, USA, 1991, video, 8 min.)
Marlon Riggs' experimental music video politicizes the homoeroticism of African-American men. With images ö sensual, sexual and defiant ö and words intended to provoke, Anthem reasserts the
'self-evident right' to life and liberty in an era of pervasive anti-gay, anti-Black backlash and hysterical cultural repression.

Fruit Machine
(Wrik Mead, Canada, 1998, video, 8 min.)
Mixing fact and fiction, Wrik Mead tells us the story of Dr. F. R. Wake and his bizarre creation, which became known as 'the fruit machine.' In the 1960s, Wake was hired by the Canadian government to devise a series of tests that would expose homosexuals working in the civil service. This modern retelling reveals that Wake may have had a few secrets of his own. Made in 1998, in a decade of very public queer censorship wars, Mead reminds us that the government is still watching.

When You Name Me
(Scott Beveridge, Canada, 1993, video, 11 min.)
Through a brutal and haunting bashing of a gay man, Beveridge reflects the fear and reality of queer bashings that were occurring in greater numbers at the time, as well as exploring the connections between militarism, HIV phobia and straight iconography in the gay and lesbian community. Through the repetition of the violence in image and prose we are forced to question not just the violence that exists externally but that which lies within. A prescient piece that questions the cost of assimilation and annihilation.

O Happy Day
(Charles Lofton, USA, 1996, video, 6 min.)
Eroticizes revolution as only queers can by collaging found footage of black men from late 60's and early 70's films, images of Black Panther Party demonstrations and depictions of Gay Power creating a moment to savor wherein we can imagine our own power and that of revolution. The soundtrack is punctuated by a 1970 quotation from Black Panther leader Huey Newton: "There's nothing to say that a homosexual cannot also be a revolutionary. Quite on the contrary, maybe a homosexual could be the most revolutionary..." In the 90's this all seemed possible . .

Stolen Shadows
(John Killacky, USA, 1995, video, 10 min.)
Stolen Shadows is a devastating account from filmmaker Killacky of friends and lovers lost to AIDS. Evoking both the experience of grief and survival, Killacky recounts the story of an assisted suicide in an elegiac narration set against the drone of Scottish bagpipes creating a haunting and stark piece of poetry.

This is Nothing
(John Greyson, Canada, 1999, video, 8 min.)
In true Greyson fashion blending political activism, theory and homosexual desire, This is Nothing has Dimitrije in Belgrade sending emails to Jack in Toronto describing what it is truly like to be in the midst of NATO's bombing campaign. Jack dreams he is a CIA operative assigned to assassinate antiwar theorist Noam Bombski.

Without Leave
(Karl Fodor, Canada, 2002, video, 3 min.)
Granted this piece is not from the 90's but this toned and manipulated film brings forward the same yearnings of going AWOL in 1990 as it does in 2002.

Finally Destroy Us
(Tom Kalin, USA, 1991, video, 4 min.)
"But these meetings, these partings, finally destroy us." Virginia Woolf, The Waves. Set to Cole Porter's Everytime We Say Goodbye Kalin washes us with images of men who love and whom he might have loved. Are they still with us?



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