Tayta by Jose Luis Benavides
This experimental video-portrait features the collages and paintings of the trans-Palestinian-American artist, Ali El-Chaer. As an intimate look at their artwork, it shares their experiences and art-making process, related to land, body, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Interlaced with the director’s text messages, footage in the West Bank, and a 3D animated character, El-Chaer helped design. The non-binary figure overlaps scenes, and points to a future without gendered, ethno-racial, or religious forms of violence. The adhan call to prayer, Arab-Christian iconography, and broader connections to identity, and love are interlaced through the work.
Running time: 00:10:00
For Carlos (Brazil)
You went away without giving me the chance to say goodbye. Only now, traveling alone far from Goiás, am I able to say farewell. I am writing this letter for that reason.
Running time: 00:15:00
Parda (United States) by Akhil Joondeph
Inspired by depictions of queer dancers and courtesans in ancient paintings and temple sculptures, “Parda” (The Veil) explores the tensions between historical sexual freedom, queerness, modesty, heteropatriarchy, revisionist Indian history, and hereditary artistic communities. How has queerness been erased, veiled, closeted in the past, present, and future? How has the canon, modern tellings of ancient history, and contemporary narratives surrounding both queer people and hereditary dancers obscure important perspectives, and how has queerness and queer community persisted in the past, present, and future to outlive every bigot and bigoted institution?
Running time: 00:03:26
Pink (United Kingdom) by Yassa Khan
Pink is based on the true story of Yassa Khan, who in 2001 spent a fleeting 24 hours with his bank robbing father, Hassan Khan. Hassan, who had just been released from a twelve year prison sentence, takes his son Yassa on a whirlwind journey into his criminal way of life. As the pair get to know each other again in the most unexpected of circumstances, they go on an emotional journey through crime, pain, and the past. Culminating in Yassa coming out to his father as being gay, which shows Yassa who his father really is and in turn who he is.
Running time: 00:22:05
Born With An Extra Rib (United States) by stefa marin alarcon, Lilleth
Born With an Extra Rib is an operatic biomythography for the diasporic and dysphoric, longing to find a body & a place to call home. An intimate spiral on an epic scale, this cinematic performance-ritual is an invitation into a portal, where the extra rib stefa was born with is the key: If even our bones transcend Adam and Eve’s creation mythology, maybe we can be re-made beyond colonial gender & theology. Maybe our god is trans-indigenous possibility. Maybe we can mourn who we could have been, by celebrating who we managed to become.
Running time: 00:40:00