kusama pyjamas
Titled for Yayoi Kusama, who is the cat's pyjamas.
Mobile Homecoming is an innovative and loving response to a deep craving for intergenerational connection. A craving that lives in the hearts of queer black same gender loving elders and visionaries. A craving that has taken over the minds of two young queer black women. Julia Wallace of Queer Renaissance and Alexis Pauline Gumbs of BrokenBeautiful Press have decided to dedicate the next phase of their lives to collecting and amplifying the social organizing herstories of black women, trans men, and gender queer visionaries who have been refusing the limits of heteronormativity and opening the world up by being themselves in the second half of the 20th century.
There are only 3 days left to fund this project!
Pay It No Mind: Marsha P. Johnson
About this project
Dear Friends, Documentary Film Supporters, Activists, and Admirers of Great Courage,
We are in the final post-production stage of an hour-long documentary about the revolutionary trans-activist Marsha P. Johnson. Marsha P. was a seminal figure in the downtown New York City scene from the ‘60s through the ‘90s. Known as “The Saint Of Christopher Street,” Johnson was an instigator at Stonewall, an Andy Warhol model, and a proud, take-no-nonsense drag queen.
We are so close to finishing this inspirational film, and interest in it has been such that we were invited to screen the rough cut version at New York’s IFC Theatre. We want to share this documentary with you, but we need just a little help with some finishing funds to help us pay for archival video clips, historical photographs, a sound mix, videotape stock, digital transfers, and a few film festival application fees (programmers are already interested in the film).
Antony, founder of the musical group Antony and the Johnsons has generously donated his music and contribution gifts to make this documentary a reality. (And for those of you that didn’t already know, Antony originally named his band in honor of the documentary’s subject, Marsha P. Johnson.)
This historic documentary includes interviews with performer Agosto Machado, author Michael Musto, performer/director Jimmy Camicia, Warhol superstar and poet Taylor Mead, and the Stonewall Uprising historian David Carter, among many others.
Please help us to tell this vital, entertaining, and moving story.
Everyone working on this film has donated their labor. We just need a small financial push to get Marsha’s story out to the world, where it rightly belongs.
Thank you for your love.
(via so-treu)
Featured Interview: Jackie Anderson, 69
From The Untitled Black Lesbian Elder Project documentary, by tonia.m.
fuckyeahfeministartandliterature:
Hello, everyone! I just wanted to let you know that !Women Art Revolution is now on Netflix instant stream. Enjoy!
arrghh we don’t get netflix here! for those that do though…
![(via William Yang – The Art of Seduction | Iris Prize Short List 2011)
William Yang, The Art of Seduction Doco. 2010. Dir. Craig Boreham [image ‘Alpha’ by by William Yang, Brisbane late 60’s]
William Yang is a third-generation Australian-Chinese artist whose work examines his Chinese family history and gay identity. This documentary looks at one aspect of William’s work as a photographer - male nudes - the most personal and vulnerable of his work because it always involves a negotiation or transaction.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2o4i5fm1s1qaqhqdo1_250.jpg)
(via William Yang – The Art of Seduction | Iris Prize Short List 2011)
William Yang, The Art of Seduction Doco. 2010. Dir. Craig Boreham [image ‘Alpha’ by by William Yang, Brisbane late 60’s]
William Yang is a third-generation Australian-Chinese artist whose work examines his Chinese family history and gay identity. This documentary looks at one aspect of William’s work as a photographer - male nudes - the most personal and vulnerable of his work because it always involves a negotiation or transaction.
Zanele Muholi | Interview
Artist and activist Zanele Muholi discusses her documentary Difficult Love (2011) and her aim to disrupt the victimising discourse around black lesbians in South Africa. While she affirms the continued importance of speaking about hate crime and ‘corrective/curative’ rape, her film gestures towards a more capacious conversation, one that makes it possible to apprehend ’black lesbians and their families, black lesbians and their children, black lesbians and education, black lesbians taking over the movement … using the art as their means.’
Difficult Love is a magnificent film. Watch it here.
African Women Filmmakers Tell Their Stories
Documentary filmmaking holds a special place in the history of African women’s cinema. In 1972, Senegalese filmmaker Safi Faye became the first sub-Saharan African woman to make a commercially distributed feature film when she directed “Kaddu Beykat”. The film, a mixture of fiction and documentary, depicts the economic problems suffered by Senegalese village farmers because of agriculture policies that Faye says rely on an outdated, colonial system of groundnut monoculture. Faye would go on to direct several documentaries often focused on rural life in her native Senegal.
African women who have taken documentary filmmaking to new levels come from across the continent and handle a wide range of topics. The films show an Africa that is not often seen, according to Beti Ellerson, director of the Center for the Study and Research of African Women in Cinema. Ellerson, who teaches courses in African studies, visual culture and women studies in the Washington, DC, area, is also the producer of a 2002 documentary, “Sisters of the Screen: African Women in the Cinema.”
Much has changed since Faye’s early Senegalese films. The emergence of the Internet, social media and crowd-funding platforms such as Kickstarter now offer a new generation of African women documentary filmmakers the tools to realize their visions. To learn of the challenges and opportunities facing African women filmmakers, AllAfrica’s Genet Lakew and Rahwa Meharena asked three women - Salem Mekuria, Rahel Zegeye and Sosena Solomon (pictured above) - to share their stories. They represent two generations of Ethiopian documentary filmmaking.
related: it feels like docos, esp. queer, WOC and QPOC produced docos, are on fire now. Despite the internet censorship agendas going on, it seems like every week there’s more happening with queer creatives adapting this medium to their message and distributing online.
(Source: , via thefeeloffree)
(via Audre Lorde - The Berlin Years)
Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 focuses on Audre Lorde’s relation to the German Black Diaspora, her literary as well as political influence, and is a unique visual document about the times the author spent in Germany. The film is also for coming generations a valuable historical document of German history, which tells about the development of an Afro-German movement and the origins of the anti-racist movement before and after the German reunification. The film relates the beginnings of these political debates and therefore facilitates a historical analysis and an understanding of present debates on identity and racism in Germany. For the first time, Dagmar Schultz’s archival video- and audio recordings and footage will be made available to a wide public. The film represents an important addition to the documentary “A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde“ by Ada Gray Griffin and Michelle Parkerson which was screened at the 45th Berlin Film Festival in 1995.
(via Artist: The Dream of the Audience)
Although she lived only 31 years, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha left a substantial and diverse body of work. The primary mediums in which she worked were: ceramic, performance, artist’s books, concrete poetry, film, video, sculpture, mail art, audio, and slide projections. In many cases her work combined aspects of different media, blurring the boundaries between conventionally distinct categories. It was characteristic of Cha to take the thematic and formal approaches developed in one medium and reinterpret them in another; elements of film and video, for example, find their way into artist’s books and vice versa.
The central theme of Cha’s art is displacement. While she occasionally addressed the personal and historical circumstances of her exile directly, Cha typically treated this theme symbolically, representing displacement through shifts and ruptures in the visual and linguistic forms of her works. She developed an approach to displacement based largely on cinematic forms and the psychoanalytic aspects of French film theory. Cha integrated elements of these theories into her own exploration of the processes of memory, communication, and psychic transformation.
Lawrence Rinder
Director of University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
from the site of the in production documentary on Cha’s life and works The Dream of the Audience.
definition: Aya de Leon looks at the process of Bay area spoken word artist Aya de Leon, whose work is at all times political and certainly fresh. Whether dissecting images of women in hip hop, or exposing the constructs of gender and beauty, Aya de Leon makes you think, makes you laugh, makes you cry, makes you listen. To learn more about the phenom’s work, check out the docu-bio, which explores the writer/poet/activist’s artistic process, and the lives she touches as she moves through the world.
* definition: Aya de Leon is Directed by Jennifer Ongiri Produced by Marla Renee Leech and Shalonda Ingram. via Purchase definition: Aya de Leon | Nursha Project
Trailer VCA - COCO FUSCO: I Like Girls in Uniform (by ACVideobrasil)
“And, uh, thats one of the things that i like about performance. Is that it allows for the emergence of those strange behaviours that you don’t otherwise see.”
touching on race, class, immigrant experience, art, performance, queerness, pressures to be a mother, post S11 nationalism, multimedia randomness, state interrogation = I heart this doco.
The work of gay artist and activist David McDiarmid is still illuminating, writes Stephanie Bunbury. IN 1993, two years before he died at the age of 43, artist David McDiarmid gave a snappily illustrated talk about his own life called A Short History of Facial Hair.
This mix of art, queer activism and whiskers put a whole new spin on the idea of the personal being political. Witness McDiarmid in Melbourne in the ’70s, right in the thick of Gay Liberation and looking every inch the radical. ”Curly Afro, terrible beard, gonorrhoea,” he summed himself up. Cut to a gang of he-boys outside a Sydney bar. ”Butch. Syphilis. Short hair,” he said. There he is on Fire Island, having moved to New York and into Studio 54 circles via hustling, art or both. Naturally, he had a large moustache.
A Short History of Facial Hair has now been turned into a film, with an actor reading McDiarmid’s essay and a riot of images of the artist and some of his works - murals and Mardi Gras installations, flamboyant male fashions and paintings - that form the centrepiece of a small exhibition of his work at the London College of Fashion until the end of this month.
Trailer for “I Am” (documentary by Sonali Gulati) (by iamdocumentary)
I Am is a feature-length documentary film that chronicles the journey of an Indian lesbian filmmaker who returns to Delhi, eleven years later, to re-open what was once home, and finally confronts the loss of her mother whom she never came out to. As she meets and speaks to parents of other gay and lesbian Indians, she pieces together the fabric of what family truly means, in a landscape where being gay was until recently a criminal and punishable offense.
(via creatrixtiara)
