1pm - Maya Deren Theater

Special Presentation: "Out/Lines: Underground Gay Graphics Before Stonewall" by Tom Waugh     free admission!
Gay male representation of sexuality has a long history of varied visibility and acceptance, but the 100 or so years of queer life before Stonewall were a period of unprecedented self-identification as well as renewed pressure to hide and suppress the erotic imagery of gay men in western culture. Queer film scholar Tom Waugh's new book Out/Lines, a sequel to his landmark study Hard To Imagine, features a resurrection of erotic gay images, once virtually buried and invisible, that circulated in clandestine communities whose sexualized visibility was a potentially devastating risk--a wealth of approximately 200 previously unpublished "obscene" images from the queer pre-Stonewall underground.

Thomas Waugh teaches film studies at Montréal's Concordia University, where he is also coordinator of the program in interdisciplinary studies in sexuality and a community lecture series on HIV/AIDS. A critic, public lecturer and festival programmer, he is also the author of Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from their Beginnings to Stonewall and The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema.
Community co-presenter: Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation

2pm - Courthouse Theater

Filmmaker in Focus: Lana Lin     [buy tickets]
Experimental veteran Lana Lin takes center stage in this program featuring her two most recent works:

Co-presented by Asian CineVision

No Power To Push Up the Sky
(2001, USA, video, 23 min.)
Taking its title from a literal translation of the slogan 23-year old student leader Chai Ling wrote on her clothes during the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square, No Power To Push Up the Sky has fifteen people spontaneously translate excerpts of an interview with her conducted in Beijing on May 28, 1989, from the original Chinese into spoken English. This performative translation allows viewers to witness the active struggle to articulate meaning and destabilizes the assumption that a fixed account of the events ever existed. By positioning translation as an interpretive act which produced from multiple vantage points, the video calls attention to the subjective motivations underlying any understanding of history and demonstrates the complex process of locating meaning across language, culture and politics.

--screened with:

Mysterial Power
(2002, Taiwan/USA, video, 53 min.)
Mysterial Power is both a personal and ethnographic pursuit of knowledge through my interactions with and interpretation of family, spirituality and everyday life in Taiwan. More of an absent center than the video's actual center, my adolescent cousin, who has communicated with one of the deities of Taiwanese mythology since she was five years old, was the inspiration for the project. The figure of the modern spiritual medium acts as a translator between different categories of experience. As one who mediates between the strange and the familiar, she offers a shifting vantage point from which we can view cultural constructions of knowledge, belief and reality.

Constructed nonlinearly, the video presents simultaneous narratives through upper and lower picture boxes. The upper box follow ritualistic activities in "real time" that the viewer can understand through their cumulative progression. The images in the lower box, although independent of the upper box, can be read in parallel association. We witness ardent worship in the context of casual recording of commonplace exchanges. The video poses questions like those put to the gods themselves: how do we negotiate our place in the world; what contributes to our sense of self; what makes us human, and how is that humanity culturally defined?

3pm - Maya Deren Theater

Memos in Light: Films by Matthias Müller     [buy tickets]
German filmmaker Matthias Müller is renowned for his unique mastery at evoking visceral emotion through dense abstraction and dream-like collisions of found footage and original processed film. Wringing dazzling sensual effects from formal manipulation, Müller's films probe the liminal realms of desire and nostalgia, death and destiny, immersing the viewer in cascades of erotic and explosive moments. This mid-career survey of films from Müller's varied and still-evolving oeuvre pays tribute to one of the most acclaimed queer film artists at work today. Guest-curated by Matt Wolf

4pm - Courthouse Theater

Queer Diasporas: The Middle Eastern and Muslim Lesbian & Gay Experience     [buy tickets]
This year MIX is pleased to introduce a new programming section, Queer Diasporas, with a program of works by and about queers of Middle Eastern and Muslim heritage.

Shifting focus between different diasporic communities from one year to the next, Queer Diasporas brings together films and videos exploring themes of migration, displacement, and exile. Diasporic lbgtq communities, often bridging the differences between attitudes and conditions of the West with their native cultures, play an important role in our understanding (and sometimes misunderstaning) of the condition of lbgtq people from other cultures. Shifting focus between different diasporic communities, Queer Diaporas brings together films and videos, charting the transnational flow of people, sexualities and ideas through the global transmission of media art.

At present, national identities are being upheld with excessive force, especially considering--if not owing to--the increased dominance of the U.S. as the world's only empire. Nowhere is the U.S.'s heightened aggression felt more strongly than in the Middle East and no community symbolizes the perils of the forced Americanization of the globe more than those of the Muslim faith. This development has had and will continue to influence the condition of queer members of Muslim and Middle Eastern societies, both in their native countries and in their diasporas.

Thus it seems appropriate to situate the first edition of our investigation of transnational lbgtq experience with the Muslim and Middle Eastern diaspora. Too long invisible within Western lbgtq communities as well as their own greater society, lesbian, gay, bi and trans Mid Easterners are increasingly relating their histories and giving voice to their complex truths, as evidenced by the illuminating works in this program.
Guest curated by Kouross Esmaeli.
Community co-sponsor: Gay and Lesbian Arab Society
program running time: 85 min.

Followed by a discussion with:
Ramzi Zakharia, Gay and Lesbian Arab Society
Tarek el-Ariss, Department of Liberal Arts, New York University
Parvez Sharma, director/producer of the feature documentary In the Name of Allah (in production)
Moderated by Kouross Esmaeli

5pm - Maya Deren Theater

Lost and Found     [buy tickets]
Sometimes things occur in our lives that change the way we see the world, whether we like it or not, and forever forward. They involve our greatest loves, our strongest bonds and our closest companions. The characters and stories in Lost and Found trigger our impulses to reconsider the meaning of our lives and force us to accept the unpredictability of experience. These are thoughtful renderings, both emotionally and formally, probing the personal and breathing life into loss.

All films in Lost and Found are in distribution with the Canadian Filmmaker's Distribution Centre in Toronto. In its 35 years of operation, CFMDC has remained dedicated to securing the visibility of national and international film productions which operate outside of mainstream models and to work on the artists' behalf to ensure that they have every possible opportunity for exhibition and economic success. Guest-curated by Dierdre Logue, Executive Director of CFMDC
--total running time: 68 minutes

6pm - Courthouse Theater

Baby Got Back     [buy tickets]
Baby Got Back is a playful multimedia program about size, fatness and queer bodies by hot and bothered fat queer artists, focusing on how we experience our bodies as powerful, sexy, and all our own. Bea Arthur, 1980's porno, Barbie, and synchronized swimming all come together as the many layered cake of fat queer sexuality is whipped up to offer you this rare and tasty treat. The show will be jump-started with live radical cheerleading by the luscious ladies of Toronto-based performance group Pretty, Porky and Pissed Off. Guest-curated by Laura Campagna & Tara Mateik
Community co-presenters: National Organization of Lesbians of Size and Big Daddy Boxers; co-sponsor: Toys In Babeland
--program running time: 72 min.

7pm - Maya Deren Theater

Fluid Sexualities     [buy tickets]
Neither a standard collection of coming-of-age tapes nor precisely a sex program, Fluid Sexualities gathers together artists who negotiate their sexual identities and confront the viewer with the exchange of fluids. Flowing from the experience of weathering adolescence to defying cultural taboos and back again, this program recognizes that queerness is rarely as simple as the dichotomy between hetero or homo, and as often as not messy, heartbreaking and perversely pleasurable. Curated by the Festival Programming Committee
Community co-presenter: the Center for Lesbian & Gay Studies, CUNY
--program running time: 69 min.

8pm - Courthouse Theater

Slap That Celluloid     [buy tickets]
Fetishizing the celluloid filmstrip as an erotic, mutable, and laboring body, the exquisite hand-processed works in this collection showcase a devotional and daring film aesthetic. Mining the rich graphic tradition in avant-garde cinema, these shorts use optical and contact printing, handpainting, scratching, re-photography and other formal manipulations to investigate the elusive materiality of the emulsion itself. Curated by the Festival Programming Committee
Community co-presenter: Pride at Work, NYC Chapter
--program running time: 87 min.

9pm - Maya Deren Theater

Trans-Formers: More Than Meets the Eye     [buy tickets]
Since before you were born, queers have been fucking their gender. And just when you thought you had your sexual identity all figured out, these shorts came along to capsize your comfort with received sexual categories. This playful spectacle of faggotty dykes, dykey faggots, two-spirited genderbenders and pansexual schoolboys has a little somethin'-somethin' for everyone. Whether through new-school prosthetic play or old-fashioned strength of fantasy, the hotties in these shorts are mapping out trans-tastic rest stops on the highway that runs from F to M and back again. Featuring a live performance by Imani Henry, from the show "B4T (Before Testosterone)". Curated by the Festival Programming Committee
--program running time: 75 min.

10pm - Courthouse Theater

Innovations Features - Festival Centerpiece:
I Love the Sound of the Kalachnikov, It Reminds Me of Tchaikovski
by Philippe Vartan Khazarian (2001, France/Great Britain, video, color/b&w, 75 min.) US premiere     [buy tickets]
An impressionistic, autobiographical first feature tracing the long shadows of the 1915 Armenian genocide through the director's family history. This unusual film is a love story of sorts set at the end of the last century, when a visit to a war zone in Karabagh calls forth memories of both the awful fate of the city and the filmmaker's personal tragedy years earlier. Seamlessly blending image formats from 35mm to Super 8 and practically everything in between, the French-bred, London-based documentarian Philippe Vartan Khazarian assembles a stunningly sensuous mosaic, anchored by lucid historical memory yet illuminated with flashes of unexpected eroticism, erupting like heat lightning--or, in this case, missile glare. This enormously accomplished début introduces a major new talent in queer cinema.
Filmmaker in person!

11pm - Maya Deren Theater

Low Riders     [buy tickets]
If it weren't for trash, how would we know what's supposed to be tasteful? This shorts program rides a volley of vulgarity like a mechanical bronco. Flaunting a camp aesthetic of malapropism and outrageousness, these films send up the unspeakable, the emotionally effluent and the socially mortifying. From the turgid tale of a hopeless actress, to an obtuse white dude with a bad case of "yellow fever," to the shenanigans inside an upstate poultry factory, these works trawl the muck-encrusted depths of queer film for nuggets of pure trash gold. Curated by the Festival Programming Committee
--program running time: 90 min.

12am - Courthouse Theater

The Other Side of Midnight:
Body Double X by Brice Dellsperger (1998-2000, France, digital video, 104 min.) In French with English subtitles.     [buy tickets]
A breathtaking shot-for-shot remake of Andrzej Zulawski's 1975 art film maudit L'Important c'est d'aimer (The Important Thing Is to Love), Brice Dellsperger's Body Double X recasts all of the speaking parts with the same actor, the gender-queer performance artist Jean-Luc Verna. Synchronized to the original film's soundtrack, Dellsperger and Verna conspired to create all of the film's performances (including Romy Schneider's) anew, which were painstakingly shot with blue-screen processes and digitally collaged into the original mise-en-scène. At times Verna appears on screen simultaneously portraying a dozen different characters, inducing an uncanny vertigo. The total effect is aesthetically overwhelming and unforgettable. Courtesy of Team Gallery and Air de Paris.