Running now through Sunday, the 26th MIX NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival hooked me with their summary of opening night:
"Queerdos of New York, welcome to the Funhouse. The MIX Factory reflects what you are! Hello, lover-army of fringe-dwelling geniuses! Hello, queers building community! Hello, destroyers of mainstream mediocrity! Whatever you are, let’s come together to reflect and enjoy immersive bodily experiences. We must also, sadly, reflect the world we live in. It's no secret we live in a nightmare surveillance state that conducts robo-drone-massacres while it poisons the planet. The films this year show sites of resistance to ever-escalating police and state-corporate power, both at home [The Leak] and abroad [Bradley Manning Had Secrets]. But our mirror is wonky: it bends inward and gathers light [I Told Her This Was Home; What I Want - What I Have] then shoots a deathray back out [Chromatic Cocktail; The Memory of Objects]. Sometimes it's flattering, and shows you gorgeous things to look at [Shift; Hoshi Neko]. And other times it trolls the morons listening in [Jimmy Carter; Balls]."
Read the entire schedule here. The indispensible Peter Knegt of Indiewire asked organizers to name five unmissable programs:
We’ll Be Your Mirror (Tuesday November 12 at 8 PM)
This year we open with a premiere of a Super Special Secret Surprise from Tarnation filmmaker Jonathan Caouette. We are not at liberty to discuss the Super Special Secret Surprise any further. After that, we show 12 of the best short queer experimental films received by the MIX Programming Committee in 2013. From over 550 submissions we put together a slew of sexy-funky-psychotic visions better left unmentioned in print. Highlights include Jimmy Carter in the buff, a stunning 3D experiment in chromovision, and a rotoscope reenactment of Chelsea Manning on the eve of her arrest.Valencia: The Movie/s (Sunday November 17 at 7:30 PM)
“Valencia is the most masterful dyke-centric artsy-weirdo film I’ve ever seen.”—Autostraddle
Twenty queer filmmakers (including Cheryl Dunye, Silas Howard, and recent Sundance award-winner Jill Soloway) combine forces to create Valencia: The Movie/s, an ambitious project/experiment from author Michelle Tea and producer Hilary Goldberg. With the book Valencia as their muse, filmmakers worked separately on their own given chapter, and their resulting short films were pulled together to form an epic feature-length adaptation of the novel. Valencia: The Movie/s is an ode to 1990’s San Francisco sex radical dyke culture that speaks beautifully about love, queer politics, and alienation, accompanied by a soundtrack of vintage queercore and alt-rock tracks by bands like Team Dresch, Bratmobile, Tribe 8, Bikini Kill and Pansy Division.
Afro-Asian Visions: Exploding Lineage II (Wednesday November 13 at 7:30 PM)
Afrofuturism. The Asian avant-garde. Genderqueer love. Anarchy. Ancestral trauma.
Not Me, Murphy (Saturday November 16 at 8 PM)
The "simple” story of a man with dissociative identity disorder. It's part spiritual journey and part case study, narrated by Murphy’s caretaking girlfriend Lynn (Jason Yamas & Rebecca Robertson). A thrilling study of the very unwell mind at turns playful and at others harrowing as it renders Murphy’s reveries and terrors. Production has delivered stunning, mind-bending hallucinations, and the cast performs abley under Yamas’s one-take rule. Shot on popular amatuer medium Super VHS, Not Me, Murphy's it feels as if are watching some other family’s home movies, edited together with an avant-garde sensibility. The cuts are jumpy and disorienting while we overhear improvised conversation often vulgar, repetitive, or incomprehensible. Because Yamas’s techniques give so much over to chance, the characters feel as immediate and as inscrutable as the people we encounter in real life. It makes their violent outbursts of compassion and sex all the more surprising, and pleasurable.
From the Stom Sogo Collection: Film on Film (Thursday November 14 at 9 PM)
A dynamo whose thunderous potential was cut short by his premature death, Japanese moving-image artist Stom Sogo (1975-2012) remains a romantic rebel if ever there was one. For over two decades he created a hair-raising body of aggressively beautiful films and videos. This 70-minute program features the acclaimed film SLOW DEATH and the rest is, well, a surprise. As we type, tons of new and enticing discoveries are being made in the boxes of over 1200 films, videos and tapes that Sogo left behind. Did we just find a 400-foot reel mysteriously titled 20 CENTURY PORNO? How many abstract adaptations of Dennis Cooper novels did Stom make? We are carefully opening hundreds of envelopes of unknown film reels and you just won’t believe what we have found. This all Super-8 program will feature films projected on film, the way that Stom used to show them during his bacchanalian all-night screenings. Guest curated by Gina Carducci & Andrew Lampert.
"[A] movie's reality should be as nasty and fucked up as possible, so we want to get fuck out of the theater and hope for something better in life.... I try not to have a message or even word in my movie. But I usually have some sick stories behind each of the movies. Those are just mental eye candy that it taste sweet first, seizure second." —Stom Sogo
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