Fucking Different New York
What do construction workers do in their well-earned breaks? How might Angelina Jolie's and Brad Pitt's relationship have ended? And what really happened between Marilyn Monroe and Joan Crawford during the summer of 1959? The answers to these and many other interesting questions are provided by twelve queer New York filmmakers. Their films also scrutinize such topics as the difference between the way men and women dream, and how erotic tying a necktie or having a manicure can be.
Todd Verow
Todd Verow
Barbara Hammer
Samara Halperin
Stephen Gallagher
Andre Salas
Abigail Child
Jack Waters
Keith Levy
Kristian Petersen
Dan Borden
Lala Endara
Hedia Maron
Casts & Crew
Leslie Lowe
Lui Antonius
Deanna Gibson
Aziza Omar
Ray Warren
Also Directed by Todd Verow
Stan, a cross-dresser, inherits a house haunted by his parents.
Three Parisian women discover that their lives are delicately interconnected to a mysterious fourth woman, who remains tantalizingly out of reach.
"Bulldog in the Whitehouse" takes political satire to obscene new heights: portraying the Bush administration as a cabal of lustful and traitorous gay men who are too busy having sex to notice the empire crumbling down around them. An explosive and darkly comic adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos' novel Dangerous Liaisons, the film's web of sex and deceit centers on Bulldog, a hustler who seduces his way into the Washington press corps to gain access to the halls of the political elite. At the bidding of his puppet master, a corpulent and power mad Karl Rove, Bulldog engages in manipulative trysts with Whitehouse hotties like the demure press secretary, the religious leader and the confused, imbecilic good ol' boy president himself.
Filmmaker Chase Hook committed suicide on December 31st, 1979. His conservative family destroyed all of his films. Recently Super 8 home movies of his last summer on Fire Island were found. Also recovered was the tape from his answering machine.
Musical theater legend Jacob Sterling is looking for a for another big break that will get one of his shows on Broadway finally.
Short film shot by Todd Verow and later edited into Frisk.
Three young artists; a trans opera singer/dj, a middle eastern American performance artist and a gay film maker, share a tiny studio apartment while they look for love and fame in NYC. They scrimp and save and scam and steal their way from month to month somehow they survive but in the new world shared economy they are just one click away from losing everything.
An actress on location in Berlin, Germany begins to blur her own life with the character she plays.
V, an older trans woman, is desperately trying to hold on to her rent stabilized apartment in New York City.
A group of older gay men get together every month and have sex parties.
Also Directed by Barbara Hammer
A montage of film clips and stills calling all lesbians to come out and celebrate who they are. In a trilogy of experimental documentaries, director Barbara Hammer rewrites history by inserting lesbians and lesbian imagery throughout educational films, newsreels, medical footage and more from the past century.
Devotion investigates the extremely complex and heirarchical relationships among a committed group of Japanese filmmakers who dedicated up to 30 years of their lives making films for one man-Ogawa Shinsuke. Members of Ogawa Pro filmed the student movement of the late 60's; the fight by farmers to save their land from government confiscaton for the Narita airport at Sanrizuka; and the village life of a small farming community, Magino Village, in northern Japan. These heartbreaking and sometimes funny stories have never been told on film before. Rare footage, stills, and diaries with interviews with Oshima Nagisa, Hara Kazuo and Robert Kramer make this historical inquiry visually exciting as well as valuable.
Lesbian Whale animates early notebooks drawings made by Barbara Hammer between 1969 and 1971, with a voiceover commentary by friends and peers. The drawings and paintings seen in the film were made at a crucial turning point in Hammer’s early career, both before and after she left her husband to pursue a career in art and film.
Childhood stories of the artist as a young lesbian and intimate tales of the lesbian as a young artist underscore the filmmaker's life of performances. With a Swiss army knife she robs an American Express Bank in Morocco, accosts a shepherd in a field on International Women's Day, and tap dances on Shirley Temple's star on Hollywood Boulevard. This child movie star was the ideal by which Hammer's ambitious mother measured her own Barbie. Grandma, already a cook for Lillian Gish in Hollywood, introduced the cute, loquacious child and her mother to D.W. Griffith. Lesbian autobiography is a slender genre, so Hammer draws from general culture studies for critique and to provide an ironic edge to the synthesized "voices of authority".
An investigation into what subway passengers are reading.
In California a young woman artist/filmmaker is led by an older female artist through the small pine forests of Mendocino and the hot desert sands of Death Valley before she is taught the lesson of creative inspiration.
1968/69, transferred S8 mm film, 4:3, color, silent, 5:19 min, Edition of 7 + 2AP
Using the sixth century B.C. lyricist's poetry, a group of women unwrap the papyrus gauze of the lesbian goddess and bring her to life. Made by Barbara and six students, together at the Women's Building in Los Angeles.
From the first kiss to breakup, Almy and Hammer record their relationship on a reel-to-reel ¾” tape recorder and microphone. Winner of the Louise Riskin Prize at the 1976 San Francisco Art Festival.
Animation of photos and paper cut outs from a hike at Machu Pichu in Peru.
Also Directed by Samara Halperin
The animated adventures of "Tonka Tom" a gay plastic cowboy. Hitch-hiking, two-stepping at the local gay bar, and enjoying a campfire with a friend and his trusty dog.
Also Directed by Abigail Child
Filmmaker Abigail Child presents a feature-length project about girlhood and the immigrant dream, focusing on post World War II North American suburbs and between the war Europe, critically seen through the lens of gender, property and myths of nation. A rambunctious embrace, body to body, woman to woman, entrance to exitin-laws foregrounding the construction of cinematic meaning, the elusive nature of memory and desire, the hysteric familial arena of the social.
In 1983, filmmaker and poet Abigail Child cut up old footage from Between Times, a documentary profile of high school girls in Minneapolis which she had produced for WNET/PBS back in 1975. That footage would then be integrated into work of a drastically different kind: The film was called Mutiny which, by its very name, signaled her abandonment of the humanist documentary tradition to which Between Times belonged, to become, in her words, “a prismatic rhythmic pinwheel” born of the artistic and political necessity to radically rethink form. Mutiny, in turn, stood as one of the most densely woven in a series of bold experiments that came to be known as Is This What You Were Born For?
A cinematic reflection focused on the quotidian, with unexpected sound/image juxtapositions and bristling space/time vortices made cognizant through editing. The film was begun in a "blue" moment a year ago, returned to during the Covid19 pandemic and lockdown in New York City. It's pace, melancholy, and concentration on the everyday, rather than the grandiose, seem particularly suited to this moment in history. As well it returns again and again to themes of mortality and goodbye. The result is allusive and idiosyncratic, exhibiting cross-national globalism within and through the adjacencies of form and content.
A feature-length experimental video based on a 6-week stay in Mainland China in October-November 2006. The result is an intimate and critical look at China today featuring Beijing's workers, streets, stores, and parks, as well as closeup portraits of a number of characters.
Covert Action is a stunning melange of rapid-fire retro imagery accomplishing Child’s proclaimed goal to “disarm my movies.” “I wanted to examine the erotic behind the social, and remake those gestures into a dance that would confront their conditioning and, as well, relay the multiple fictions the footage suggests (the ‘facts’ forever obscured in the fragments left us). The result is a narrative developed by its periphery, a story like rumor: impossible to trace, disturbing, explosive.”
A beautifully ambiguous study of the nude in light and movement, this short silent film focuses on the dimly lit bodies of two women shot from Child’s distinctly non-male perspective.
Swamp uses the soap opera format to play with the structure and expectations of the family melodrama. Following the melodramatic format that "if it can happen, it will happen," coincidence and unlikely events abound in a gleeful send-up of lurid intrigue, threatened morality, and endless double-crosses. With looped and repeated edits, fast-paced action, and aggressively funky video effects, Child layers on artifice and excess in an overdone remake of the TV serial.
In 1983, filmmaker and poet Abigail Child cut up old footage from Between Times, a documentary profile of high school girls in Minneapolis which she had produced for WNET/PBS back in 1975. That footage would then be integrated into work of a drastically different kind: The film was called Mutiny which, by its very name, signaled her abandonment of the humanist documentary tradition to which Between Times belonged, to become, in her words, “a prismatic rhythmic pinwheel” born of the artistic and political necessity to radically rethink form. Mutiny, in turn, stood as one of the most densely woven in a series of bold experiments that came to be known as Is This What You Were Born For?
A second landscape film, in this case urban. The work constructed from materials gathered over two years looking out at downtown San Francisco from a loft on Folsom Street. The elements are “folded” and mixed, Time redefines Space: the erector and helicopter appear as toys within a schizy motor-oil-ized ballet mechanique.
Also Directed by Jack Waters
The Male GaYze presents an individual's observation of sexuality and power relations between men, a young African American dancer's reminiscence of his encounter with a famous Dutch choreographer.
An Expanded Cinema Aktionpainting Performance at Museo Hermann Nitsch, Naples, Italy, where art, wrestling and food play important roles.
Chopin "Nocturnes" accompany this study in black and white inspired by Huysman's decadent novel "À rebours".
Also Directed by Kristian Petersen
Lesbian filmmakers from Berlin were asked to make a short film about their idea of male gay love and sexuality and, vice versa, gay men were given the task of making a short film about lesbian sexuality and eroticism.
Also Directed by Dan Borden
A lesbian couple asks Tom, a lonely gay man, to be the father of their next kid. He jumps at the chance until he finds out he'll have to battle it out with two other men to be the dad.