6pm - Courthouse Theater

MIX Mexico     [buy tickets]
Folks are finally clueing in to Mexican cinema, but there's a lot more to it than Frida. As ever, our sister festival MIX Mexico continues to shower us with experimental treasures, this time including new works by Ximena Cuevas, Ricardo Nicolayevsky and Roberto Fiesco. Guest-curated by Arturo Castelán & Claudia Prado
All films in Spanish with English subtitles
Co-sponsored by the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York
--program running time: 72 min.

7pm - Maya Deren Theater

Twilight World: Super 8 Psychotica & Erotica (of the female kind)     [buy tickets]
A diary without paper, some left-over film, a dream in the middle of the night. Make no mistake about the narrow gauge of the work below, it isn't cinema--it's the awkward reality of life that somehow belongs on Super 8 and nowhere else. This is the Twilight World where the camera invades the marches of everyday life and also becomes the tool to escape it. Without actors. Guest-curated by Bobby Abate
Community co-presenter: Lesbian Herstory Archives
--program running time: 69 min.

8pm - Courthouse Theater

Innovations Features:
Un Cirque á New York (A Circus in New York) by Frédérique Pressman (2002, USA/France, video, 58 min.) US premiere     [buy tickets]
An experimental documentary following the radical queer performance troupe Circus Amok, staging their annual series of free performances in New York City's public parks during a cruel summer under the Guiliani administration. Circus Amok deploys virtuoso circus artistry as a vehicle for pointed political critique, lambasting social injustices while raucously entertaining their enthralled audiences. Vividly portraying the circus's charismatic, gender-queer founder Jennifer Miller and its other family members, the film takes an unflinching look at the persistent realities of economic struggle and police brutality faced by New York's poor communities of color, offering a bracing reminder of the just-recent past, and, through the eyes of Paris-based filmmaker Frédérique Pressman, a beguiling outsider's perspective on the city we call home.
Community co-presenter: Jews for Racial and Economic Justice
Filmmaker in person!

9pm - Maya Deren Theater

Smoke in Mirrors: Undulations of the Self     [buy tickets]
Enough about you--let's talk about me. Self-exploration has always been central to artistic process; some would say that artists are self-absorbed by necessity. These lyrical and insightful shorts probe the folds between the self, the Other, the medium, and most importantly, between all of these things and love. Tied together with neurosis, nostalgia, self-deprecation and humor, narcissism has never looked more compelling than it does here. Curated by the Festival Programming Committee
--program running time: 91 min.

10pm - Courthouse Theater

How We Learned To Start Worrying and Hate the Bomb     [buy tickets]
Irony is not dead after all in this time of overwrought earnestness. Perhaps it takes a queer sensibility to appreciate the trash aesthetic of American culture or alienation from the armed services to see the folly of contemporary military action. In the wake of rampant patriotism and mopey media, these shorts act up to present the state of the nation with wit, attitude and defiance. Curated by the Festival Programming Committee
--program running time: 95 min.

12am - Courthouse Theater

The Super 8 Cock and Booty Show     [buy tickets]
Since its introduction in 1932, 8mm film has long been considered the province of home movies, often banal travelogues sprinkled with birthdays and Christmas trees. Even when it was the precursor to the videotape and DVD releases of Hollywood movies, Super 8 "digests" (highly edited versions of feature films) stuck safely to family fare, until commercial porn entered the marketplace. But even then, highly personal artistic expressions in Super 8 have been relatively rare. This program is a collection of films (and the occasional work finished on video) that reveals the intimacy of narrow-gauge filmmaking, and the particular beauty captured by the gaze of the popular consumer cameras of the 1970s. While at times forthrightly depicting hardcore sex, this program also presents work that engages the erotics of relationships through the lens of memory, looking and oneiric desire. Inescapably, this is also a program about voyeurism, whether the maker is fetishizing a body, a televised image or another film. Yet unlike the classic adversarial dyad of psychoanalysis, I posit here a less threatening gaze, and wish everyone the happy scopophilia that the filmmakers experienced in creating this work. Guest-curated by Stephen Kent Jusick
Co-sponsored by Toys in Babeland