MIX NYC Presents a weekend of Queer Experimental Film Programming at Anthology Film Archives 

Saturday November 23rd and Sunday November 24th

SATURDAY NOVEMBER 23rd

Program One: 7:15-8:30 pm


“Within There Runs Blood” presented by Eve Oishi and Marisa Hicks-Alcaraz

This program represents the vision of two curators whose careers span twenty-five years, beginning with a program for MIX 95 and continuing through a Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles. Eve Oishi and Marisa Hicks-Alcaraz recently published their cross-generational accounts of film festival curating in a special issue of Feminist Media Histories edited by MIX Board Member Alexandra Juhasz . Taken from a line in Walt Whitman’s poem “I Sing the Body Electric,” this program traces a line from the contemporary experimental activist films of Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, a collective whose work “arises from the need to dismantle the audiovisual grammar [of] aesthetic-television-cinematic corporativism” (artists’ bio) back to the vibrant, urgent and joyful work of Marlon Riggs, which celebrated the love between Black gay men in the face of homophobia and AIDS. Both works employ strategies of visual and audio montage and the representation of sexuality that blooms with pleasure and threat.

COYOLXAUHQUI

9 min, 46 sec
Credits: Colectivo Los Ingrávidos
“A visual poem linking traditional myths with femicide in rural Mexico.”

Coyolxauhqui is a searing evocation of femicide in rural Mexico. It recasts the dismemberment of the Aztec moon goddess Coyolxauhqui by her brother Huitzilopochtli, sun, human sacrifice and war god. A visual poem about the cyclical nature of traditional myths and rituals, Coyolxauhqui is part of a trilogy that proposes itself as an act of political resistance, exploring the connection of current Mexican femicides to larger cultural formations.

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos is a collective of filmmakers and activists mainly based in and around Mexico City. Their work is characterized by both radical form work and a direct response to the political turbulence, the violence and the corruption that is a highly tangible reality in Mexican society. Mass disappearances, political and military corruption and feminine cleansing – femicide – are some subjects that the collective stays with.

ANTHEM

9 min 
Director and produced by Marlon Riggs
“A poetic anthem about the love and erotic bonds of Black gay men.”

Marlon Riggs’ experimental music video politicizes the homoeroticism of African-American men. With images—sensual, sexual and defiant—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. 

MIX Board Presents:

FOR FLO

11 min
Directed by Cary Cronenwett
Made with the support of the Robert Giard Fellowship
“Mourning the loss of a friend, the filmmaker struggles to capture the magic of their relationship on film.”

A poem to a dead friend, For Flo, is the filmmaker’s attempt to capture the magic of his brief relationship with his good friend and collaborative partner, Flo McGarrell. The piece revolves around a dream McGarrell had as a child that awakened a realization of his transgender identity.

Flo lived and worked in Jakmel, Haiti where he died in the earthquake 10 years ago. The filmmaker attempts to conjure Flo’s spirit by re-enacting his artwork and constructing an altar. Through the instability of the image, a result of hand-processing, the viewer sees the fleetingness of life reflected in the materiality of the film. 

Cary Cronenwett is an artist and storyteller who directs and produces both documentary and narrative films. His work, which foregrounds forgotten histories and marginalized stories, has screened at numerous festivals including Miami International, Outfest Los Angeles, Frameline, Queer Lisboa/ Lisbon, Identities Vienna, Montreal Image + Nation, London Flare, and Toronto Inside Out. He holds a BA from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Originally from Oklahoma, he is currently based in Los Angeles.

SUNSETS CARAMELIZADOS 

9 min
Directed by Ciriza
“A ritual to open the passageway for earthly departure and to release ancestral pain.”

In her short film, Sunsets Caramelizados, Ciriza reveals the secret poetry that she and her abuela Aida Rodriguez shared. As she submerges jewelry and her hands into a tarry pot of boiling sugar she uses invocations, sculptural ritual and the abstract erotic in an attempt to reverse ancestral pain in her Cuban bloodlines and to open a passageway for her abuela’s earthly departure.

Ciriza is a multidisciplinary artist whose works are explorations of states of fluidity and transmutation. In her performances and films she uses the body to explore the fragile threshold between being and not being. Rooted in the medicinal, her works illuminate the possibilities of healing and metamorphoses within the opacity of shadow and murk. She has shown in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Oaxaca, and traveling exhibitions throughout the U.S.   

 

FEMME FOOTPRINTS IN THE SAND

2014
4:56
Director & Editor: Damien Luxe
“Who supports you when you’re on unsteady ground? Mermaids and high heels at Riis Beach. “

 

RUBBERTIME

2017
10 min
Directed by Zavé Martohardjono
RUBBERTIME is the length // A dying leaf falls // From the top of the tallest tree // To dissolving into // The innards of the earth.

Dancing in the open air, with nature and a heavy-hearted contemplation on the constancy of violence, RUBBERTIME is a movement improvisation caught on camera paired with live performance. Days after Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were murdered, I arrived in upstate New York for my first artist residency. How to slow down time? How to contend with remote-ness during a collective mourning around racism in America? What turbulence emerges when my eyes calibrate to be able to see the chaos and violence in wilderness?

Zavé Martohardjono is a queer and trans Indonesian-American artist living in Brooklyn. They are interested in performance that spurs embodied healing, radical re-imagining, and pathways to decolonizing the body to contend with the political histories it carries. Zavé is a 2019 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence and 2019-20 Gibney Dance-in-Process Artist in Residence. They have performed at the 92Y, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Boston Center for the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, Gibney Dance, the Kennedy Center, Storm King Art Center and elsewhere.

8:30-9p MIXr: Snack and mingle with friends between Saturday programs!

SATURDAY NOVEMBER 23rd

Program Two: Feature Documentary 9:15 pm


“Empathy” by Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli

“A young professional escort wrestles with her heroin addiction as she travels between three American cities, balancing clients, friends, and health.”

 

EMPATHY

2016

83 minutes

Directed by Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli

Starring Em Cominotti

Produced by Bill Kirstein, Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli

Written by Em Cominotti and Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli

Edited by Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli

Sound Recording, Design, and Mixing by Kenny Kusiak

Music by Kenny Kusiak and Tim Rovinelli

This documentary film follows a heroin-addicted professional escort as she moves between New York City, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles. Combining frank images of the actual labor of sex work with intimate portraits of her interpersonal life, the film is an alternately humorous and harrowing look at a seldom depicted side of American life as well as a meditation on the performativity at the core of documentary filmmaking and the sex industry alike. Shot on a mixture of 16mm and HD digital video in luxuriant long takes, its disciplined style foregrounds the sensual texture of the everyday while playing with the conventions of narrative cinema, focussing on the profound interrelation of performance and identity within the socioeconomic fabric of the U.S. Written in close collaboration with its subject/star, Empathy marks the feature-length directorial debut for Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli.

Born in 1988, Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli works as a film director, editor, colourist and critic living in New York. She has directed two feature films, So Pretty, (2019, Berlinale) a literary translation/transposition focusing on gender and the utopian imagination, and Empathy (2016, FID Marseille), a performative documentary following a heroin-addicted escort across the USA. In 2019 she was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film.

 

SUNDAY NOVEMBER 24TH

Feature 8PM


World Premier of ‘dekedens by Bader AlAwadhi

‘dekedens

2014
1h:56m
Directed by Bader AlAwadhi

‘dekedens is a journey through the filmmaker’s childhood and teen years divided to three chapters. Politics: tells the tale of a family during the first Gulf War in Kuwait. Religion: explores the history of the Baha’i minority in the Middle East. Sex: explores Arab queer identity through cinema and television.

Bader AlAwadhi is a Kuwaiti born New York artist. His latest experimental feature, Mitzvot, won best feature documentary in DOC LA, and will have its international premiere this month in Kuwait Film Festival. He has an MFA in Film/Video from CalArts.