Selections from MIX NYC, Boston LGBT Film Festival

Selections from MIX NYC: The New York Queer Experimental Film Festival. May 10, 2012 - 8:30pm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston For the first time ever we are collaborating with MIX NYC to bring the best in queer experimental film to the festival. Founded in 1987 by author Sarah Schulman and filmmaker Jim Hubbard, MIX NYC produces New York's longest-running lesbian & gay film festival. MIX NYC promotes, produces and preserves experimental media that is rooted in the lives, politics, and experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and otherwise queer-identified people. This program was curated by Bug Davidson. Films in this program Common Strands Fred Ata, 12min, USA, 2011, English Common Strands exposes a hidden act that takes place within a familys home, leaving the viewer to question intimacy and its varying levels within a culture. The subject matter alludes to cultural preservation in response to displacement, and to the pressures that a new society has on the body image of the displaced, hinting at the dichotomy that can be created through rejection and/or assimilation. The event portrays each family members varying thoughts surrounding a shared interest. More info Appears in: Selections from MIX NYC: The New York Queer Experimental Film Festival. Forbidden Cigarette Christopher Westfall, 6min, USA, English Forbidden Cigarette is a brief but vivid journey into a deviant world of consensual misconduct. Told through a self-destructive haze of sexual bravado, the darkly poetic narrative is peppered with graphic hyperbole. It is an assault on the sensibilities while remaining humorous and engaging. You won't have a more entertaining cringe all day. More info Appears in: Selections from MIX NYC: The New York Queer Experimental Film Festival. Generations Gina Carducci and Barbara Hammer, 30min, USA, 2010, English In the spirit of mentoring and passing on the tradition of personal experimental filmmaking, Barbara Hammer, 70 years old, hands the camera to Gina Carducci, a young queer filmmaker. Shooting during the last days of Astroland at Coney Island, New York, the filmmakers find that the inevitable fact of aging echoes in the architecture of the amusement park and in the emulsion of the film medium itself. More info Appears in: Selections from MIX NYC: The New York Queer Experimental Film Festival. Have You Ever Seen A Transsexual Before? Chris E. Vargas, 4min, USA, 2011, English Have You Ever Seen A Transsexual Before? is both a document of a live performance in the alienating real world and a fantastical adventure into another world of queer likeness and identification. The first half of the video records a guerilla performance, and through repetition, becomes a declaration and a campaign for Female-To-Male (FTM) transsexual visibility. When the campaign proves futile I enter a magical animated world where I observe and am greeted by colorful and flamboyant wildlife. More info Appears in: Selections from MIX NYC: The New York Queer Experimental Film Festival. Its About the Night Alien Moon Partnership, 6min, USA, 2011, English Id like to serenade you with the very heavens that hang above our heads [this] is about the contradictory pain/pleasure of interpersonal relationships. The constant need to connect, to feel, to articulate when youre breathless. These texts are often lost in translation... in the hot air that evaporates as we speak. I cant begin to understand, but I want to touch and be touched. Hold on More info Appears in: Selections from MIX NYC: The New York Queer Experimental Film Festival. Its Nothing Personal Melissa Boyajian and Kellie Kildahl, 20min, USA, 2010-2012, English A glimpse into the dating woes of young, queer, twenty-something year olds, Its Nothing Personal is a three-channel series of short video scenes existing somewhere between fictional narrative and experimental art house film. The stories portray the protagonists, Kris and Kasey, and their individual experiences with dating in their small, queer, urban enclave in Boston, Massachusetts. More info Appears in: Selections from MIX NYC: The New York Queer Experimental Film Festival. Les Malaventures de Zut-Alors Jeanne Stern, 10min, USA, 2006, English The story of Siamese brother and sister, Zut and Alors, and their quest for love. Uses clock-work puppetry.Materials include book covers, crepe paper, bicycle bells, party blowers and more. More info Appears in: Selections from MIX NYC: The New York Queer Experimental Film Festival. Looking For Jiro Tina Takemoto, 6min, USA, 2011, English Looking For Jiro is a queer meditation on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Jiro worked in the prison mess hall and liked muscular men. How did this dandy gay bachelor survive imprisonment? This queer musical mash-up video features drag king performance, U.S. propaganda footage, muscle building, and homoerotic bread making. More info Appears in: Selections from MIX NYC: The New York Queer Experimental Film Festival. September Song Luther Price, 5min, USA, English Known since the 1980s for his Super-8 films and performances, Luther Price has, in recent years, turned to 16mm film, creating new works from discarded prints of old documentaries, snippets of Hollywood features, and other examples of cinematic detritus. He re-edits the footage by hand, effaces the image through scraping, buries the films to rot and gather mold, and adds chaotic visual patterns using colored inks and permanent markers. For soundtracks, he frequently uses only the brutal electromechanical noise generated by sprocket holes running through the projectors audio system. More info Appears in: Selections from MIX NYC: The New York Queer Experimental Film Festival. The Pink Ribbon Frankie Symonds, 4min, USA, 2011, English "The condo I was raised in, the cats, my mother, and me-- smiling through the gloom of cancer." More info Appears in: Selections from MIX NYC: The New York Queer Experimental Film Festival.