Submerged Queer Spaces is a documentary feature that examines queer history through an approach of urban archeology. Our cameras look at surviving architectural details of old haunts as if unearthing ancient monuments. As San Francisco grew and gentrified, communities changed, shifted, and were displaced. Bars, restaurants, parks, alleys, bathhouses, and other gathering spots of the queer community were remodeled, repurposed, rebuilt, or destroyed. Submerged Queer Spaces looks at the architectural remains of historic sites and buildings in San Francisco. Eight interview subjects recount firsthand experiences in these lost environs. Gerald Fabien experienced gay San Francisco before WWII, and tells tales of sailors, mariners, and the dangers of Union Square cruising. Guy Clark and Jae Whitaker discuss the unexpected racism they experienced in supposedly liberal, gay San Francisco. Each subject sheds light on what spaces used to be in earlier days of the queer community. Wilfred Galila’s artful cinematography and archival images from the Henri Leleu Papers of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society bring these sites to life.
Filter Films
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Satan is sleeping with your next door neighbour. A film that examines the growing sense of something awful about to happen, and the helplessness of preventing it. Inspired by the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. Satan was created as a collaboration between filmmaker Lisa Morse, and poet and writer Dan Walsh, through the Atlantic Filmmakers Co-op program, A Certain Openness: the filming of poetry.
Satan
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Using a monologue format to humorously explore the nature of celebrity and the relationship we have to images on television, “Elizabeth Taylor Sometimes” features an excellent performance from Davey (who also wrote the piece) and is assuredly directed by Strutt.
Elizabeth Taylor Sometimes
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A young man seeks to find adventure, love and work, leaves for the Yukon, finding all three and more as he matures and finds his calling.
Fireland (The Sloko Valley Fire)
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An animated documentary web-series about the successes, failures, and incredible confusion trying to date as a genderqueer/trans person.
Dating Sucks: A Genderqueer Misadventure
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Lucienne Delyle, Tsygan the dog, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and a mantis meet in the desert to take the waters and sing of love. An anarchistic exploration of mythologies and performative languages of romantic love and illusion combining legend, cartoon and dream. Shot in the Anza Borrego desert on Kodachrome and Ektachrome Super 8.
Jacumba Song
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Synaesthetic Anaesthesia is the product of many long years, experimenting with optical printing, travelling mattes, high contrast manipulation and other film specific techniques and processes. The optical printer is used to manipulate archival imagery from the colonial era, forming a layered tapestry with contemporary images of landscapes, architecture and phenomena. By means of montage and optical recombination the film takes these historical fragments and builds them up to a frantic pitch. The film seeks to depict the frenetic digital information age but entirely through traditional photomechanical methods, a reversal of the norm. The sound design enhances the film’s transformations, and provides a sensitive counterpoint to the “colonial eye.” The role of the colonist as exploiter of natural and human resources is evident, the filmic mediation brings these images into a contemporary context. The current era of wartime is intrinsically linked to a historical progression of events, but the seeds are sown early, in the days of the Empire builders. The tapestry of images, sounds and ideas builds in complexity over the course of the film. The resulting visual chaos is suggestive of the chaos and destruction in the world today. The title Synaesthetic Anaesthesia is suggestive of a 1960’s sensibility. The film reveres the great synaesthetic cinema of the 1960’s, the Whitney Brothers, Jordan Belson, Pat O’Neill and others. The film also owes a debt to synaesthetic experimental artists in music, painting and film from the 1920’s onwards who relentlessly pushed modernity forward and, in particular, to their cross-pollination of ideas relating to image and sound composition and their interrelationship in the Age of the Machine.
Synaesthetic Anesthesia
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Film made by John Kneller with a sound design by John Shipman. It focuses on the environment using time-lapse cinematography as a means to capture phenomena that is impossible to see with the naked eye. Automated pan, tilt and zoom mechanics were custom-built by the filmmaker to augment the time-lapse techniques. The resulting imagery is a hyper-reality of landscapes transformed by means of the camera’s mechanical mediation. The sound design was created from naturally recorded sound phenomena and musical performances. The Romantic musical elements are reminiscent of lyrical depictions of nature and environment. The deliberate mediation of the sound and image suggests that our relationship to the environment cannot be viewed outside of the realm of the political. The film is a lament for the plundering of the earth. Paradoxically, the camera also exists to plunder the earth, mining images. The film was completed in 2006.
This Film Has No Commercial Value
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As the heartbroken Papageno from The Magic Flute is on the brink of ending his life, we pause to examine his options. “Film Concerto in Hanging Major” is a highly informative, yet darkly humorous, guide into the most effective ways of committing suicide.
Film Concerto in Hanging Major
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Footage from a cardiac catheterization, intertwined with a recording of a telephone conversation and old 8mm home films, tell the story of a mother’s conflicting desire to escape a poor marriage by returning to her homeland, despite the possibility of being victimized at the hands of the government upon her return due to a past incident. “Arrhythmia” is an intimate piece about family, distance and identity.
Arrhythmia
