António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro, 1989, Portugal 88 min

António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro’s final film, Rosa de Areia, is their most unclassifiable endeavor. The film is a work of sensuous abstraction performed in the open air of Trás-os-Montes, the remote region in Portugal’s Northeast which was a site of lifelong inspiration for the duo. In a series of ritualistic, highly elaborate sequence shots, as elusive and exquisite as the “desert rose” of the film’s title, Reis and Cordeiro spin a cosmic tale of nature and the human condition, drawing on a diverse range of texts ranging from Michel de Montaigne to Carl Sagan. In Cordeiro’s words, ‘Rosa de Areia is a film for those who can see and listen as if for the first time; as if it was the first film that came from the earth and spoke about it

António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro, 1982, Portugal, 115 min

Largely unknown outside Portugal, filmmakers António Reis (1927-1991) and Margarida Cordeiro (b. 1939) are legendary figures in their native country. Reis was a poet, a folklorist, and an ethnographer; Cordeiro, a psychiatrist by trade. Across the four films they made together, the duo forged a cinema of profound commitment, deeply rooted in the language, labors, myths, dreams, and material realities of a land and a people: namely, the peasants of Trás-os-Montes in Portugal’s remote Northeast. With one foot firmly anchored in the earth and the other in the cosmos, Reis and Cordeiro conjure up the deep, cyclical time of folk tradition. Their films are a collision of the forces of documentary and poetry, fact and fabulation, the ancient and the avant-garde, a vertigo of contradictions at once harmonious and sharply unreconciled. Employing simple and direct means, their work is all the more mystical for being so concrete. ‘Here and nowhere else. Here and anywhere else’—this is the paradoxical space-time of their films, in the words of Serge Daney

António Reis, Margarida Cordeiro 1976, Portugal, 111m

A film of long shadows and smoke in twilight, Trás-os-Montes is an intensive labor of recollection, an epic of a land and a way of life on the edge of oblivion, and a major turning point in the history of Portuguese cinema. In 1974, filmmakers António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro traveled ten thousand kilometers across the isolated, near-mythical region in the Northeast of Portugal known as Trás-os-Montes. They recruited a cast of inhabitants old and young from local villages to materialize their histories, legends, dreams, and nightmares for the camera. The philosophy of the peasants, their rebellion, their everyday existence far from the laws of church and state, and their closeness to ancient things—these encounters informed the dialectical approach of the film, where fiction and reality, past and future swell in an immediate present. The result is a work of deep and threatened lyricism. In voiceover, Reis and Cordeiro adapt passages from Kafka and the Chinese poet Po Chü-i, translated to the guttural subdialect of the Northeast. As an act of solidarity with a people facing extinction, Trás-os-Montes echoes through time.

Kamal Aljafari 2025, Palestine, 112 minutes

Constructed from three MiniDV tapes shot in Gaza in 2001 and rediscovered years later, the film transforms recovered footage into a profound cinematic meditation on memory, loss, and the passage of time.

Originally conceived as a search for a former prison mate from 1989, the film unfolds into an unexpected road trip from the north to the south of Gaza with Hasan, a local guide whose fate remains unknown. As the camera moves through Gaza’s streets and landscapes, it records fleeting moments of everyday life—fragments of a reality now irreversibly altered. With Hasan in Gaza throws mainstream images of a people displaced into relief through the traces of absence bygone time evokes.

Wrestling with writer’s block for her first film, Bouchra, a queer Moroccan jackal living in NYC, starts having difficult yet overdue phone calls with her mother in Casablanca that begin influencing the project. Balancing the precarity of working as an artist in New York, the rift in her identity between her two homes and an array of friendships and romantic interests, Bouchra’s emotional reckoning with her mother and herself becomes her path to expression.

With a lived-in granularity and unmistakable visual style, BOUCHRA, the feature debut from acclaimed visual artists Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki (best known together from their 2020 web series 2 LIZARDS), is a singular portrait effortlessly towing the line between documentary, visual art and resonant family drama. Deeply felt, surprisingly sexy and formally adventurous, Bennani and Barki’s distinctive debut forges new ground that “will make it a classic of queer cinema for years to come” (Next Best Picture).

RiYL: Ryan Trecartin, early 2000s video games, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the visuals of Chungking Express

FREE SCREENING!

Stanley Nelson and Traci A. Curry, 2021, USA, 116 min

This unnervingly vivid dive into the 1971 uprising from Emmy® winning director Stanley Nelson sheds new light on the enduring violence and racism of the prison system and highlights the urgent, ongoing need for reform 50 years later.

The short Girls at the Carnival will play before the feature presentation. Total runtime of program = 82 min

Ruth Leitman & Carol Weaks Cassidy, 1994, USA

Everyone needs more WILDWOOD, NJ in their lives. Shot on dreamy Super 8 film by directors Ruth Leitman and Carol Weaks Cassidy with an all-women crew, this documentary shines a light on the lives of women from Wildwood, New Jersey—the last great American carnival town. From go-go dancers to girls who work as vampires in the boardwalk haunted house, the film moves beyond big hair and press-on nails to look into the souls of women raised on the boardwalk's rides, neon lights, and beaches. It’s easy to see why Lana Del Rey included footage from the movie in her "Diet Mountain Dew" music video. This screening includes found media sensation GIRLS AT THE CARNIVAL and cinéma vérité wonder MALL CITY—two films that feel like spiritual cousins to our friends in Wildwood.

Join SALA Dallas & For the Record by Claire for the 5th (!!) installment of the Sapphic Film Club at Spacy - but this time it’s the Pride edition. We’re doing a few things differently this time around, but we’ll still have the vibes and fun you’ve come to love. Come check out a quintessential early 2000’s spy rom com with us; D.E.B.S is truly a hidden gem and a screening you won’t want to miss!

DRESS CODE: Spy Chic

Here’s a quick snapshot of the movie:

Recruited by the U.S. government for their unique ability to lie, cheat, and fight, Amy, Max, Janet, and Dominique join an underground academy of secret agents known only as D.E.B.S. These crime-fighting hotties set out to save the world—and keep their lipstick perfectly applied while doing so. Now the girls must combine their skills for their most important mission: to capture vexing vixen Lucy Diamond, the deadliest criminal the world has ever known.

Angela Robinson, 2004, USA, 91 min

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS:

* 4:00p - D.E.B.S (2004) Screening

* 6:00p - Post-Film Discussion - Spy Culture in the early 2000’s

* 6:45p - Mingling & For the Record by Claire - Mad 4 Plaid themed pop up

There will be a curated selection from the inventory of For the Record by Claire for sale - clothes inspired by D.E.B.S. Event attendees will get first access to this exclusive themed inventory!

Pre-recorded post-screening virtual Q&A with the director Ruth Leitman moderated by programmer Evan Gordon.

Ruth Leitman & Carol Weaks Cassidy, 1994, USA, 59 mins

Everyone needs more WILDWOOD, NJ in their lives. Shot on dreamy Super 8 film by directors Ruth Leitman and Carol Weaks Cassidy with an all-women crew, this documentary shines a light on the lives of women from Wildwood, New Jersey—the last great American carnival town. From go-go dancers to girls who work as vampires in the boardwalk haunted house, the film moves beyond big hair and press-on nails to look into the souls of women raised on the boardwalk's rides, neon lights, and beaches. It’s easy to see why Lana Del Rey included footage from the movie in her "Diet Mountain Dew" music video. Plus: this release also includes found media sensation GIRLS AT THE CARNIVAL and cinéma vérité wonder MALL CITY—two films that feel like spiritual cousins to our friends in Wildwood.

Armand Weston, 1978, USA, 103 min

At a lavish party thrown by an unknown host, Linda (Leslie Bovee) happens upon a screening room where she views an ancient stag film from the 1920s depicting a very old man seducing a middle-aged woman. Later beside the pool, Linda meets the party's mysterious host, Darrin Blue (Wade Nichols), who invites her on a drive through the country to hear his incredible life story. Through a series of flashbacks set in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s—each emulating the cinema and culture of their era—but how has Darrin managed to stay eternally young throughout the decades?

An X-rated "take off" on Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, filmmaker Armand Weston's acclaimed Take Off is a delightful pop culture pastiche featuring a guest appearance by none other than Andy Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn.

Rosa von Praunheim, Germany, 1979, 90 mins

Classically-trained opera singer, cabaret mainstay, and underground film star Tally Brown commands the screen in this German FIlm Award-winning portrait from Rosa von Praunheim. With appearances and appreciations by Divine, Taylor Mead, Holly Woodlawn, and more, TALLY BROWN, NEW YORK is a tribute to a larger-than-life personality and an elegy for a changing city.

FREE SCREENING!

This 60 min screening is a global film event from Queer Cinema for Palestine (QCP) co-organized by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).

Queer Cinema for Palestine began as an alternative ethical space for filmmakers who pulled or refused to show their work in the Israeli government-sponsored TLVFest LGBTQ Film Festival. This year’s program focuses on the work of queer, Palestinian, and allied artists, across locales, in historic Palestine and the diaspora, identities, lengths, styles and genres to highlight art’s position in resistance and the struggle for liberation.

Film Program

A Message, Mama Ganuush, 2:51 min, Palestine (2026)

A short documentary film capturing the queer Palestinian voices in exile.

Mama Ganuush is a trans Palestinian performance artist, filmmaker, organizer, and activist whose work is a potent and unflinching expression of Palestinian futurism. Based between San Francisco and Lisbon, their performances are a powerful synthesis of Palestinian folk art and music, the elegance of Egyptian golden-era dance, and the raw, spontaneous energy of clown and theater.

Ceasefire بِكَفِّي قَهْـر , Teodor Vladár, 23 min, Slovakia/Hungary (2025)

Nawras, a Jordanian-Palestinian queer artist, has been living in Slovakia, Bratislava for the past four years. Living within two communities and clashing cultures, she is pushed towards a third goal; to find peace and a place she can call home. Now, she is reclaiming the culture she was born into, this time, as she chooses to define it, and in doing so, creating a community which becomes her family.

The 5-Year Plan for Financial Independence, Dua Omari, 7 min, Palestine (2025)

This video reflects on Palestine’s history as a repeating cycle of injustice, imagining a future where the system remains unchanged and violence continues. It exposes the failure of the global system to deliver real justice, offering only symbolic solutions that do not improve daily life. Palestinians are forced to adapt to conditions below basic human dignity, kept in a state of false hope with no clear path to freedom or dignity.

Until We Return, Huss AC, 11 min, Egypt/Scotland (2025)

Until We Return drifts between memory and dream, moving from the flicker of a sixth birthday on VHS to the final unknowing farewell of a vanished home. Unfolding like a passage along the Nile, through dreamlike currents of Cairo where memory and presence blur, part vision, part yearning, part possibility. Upon its waters, a fragile utopia awakens, a world where separation never came to be, where return is still within reach, and the home once lost flows back into being.

We Will Haunt Your Archive, R.R., 10 min, United States (2026)

December 2, 2023. A queer protest erupts in San Francisco in solidarity with Palestine.The film situates this action within the longer history of ACT UP’s activism during the AIDS crisis. It explores glitch as a radical feminist tactic for resisting contemporary regimes of surveillance and silencing.

Sorry, John Greyson, 7 min, Canada (2024)

A portrait of three young women: Luna Alyaan, a young Gaza violinist, killed by an Elbit drone; Eden Golan, a Zionist singer who represented Israel at 2024’s Eurovision in Malmo; and Greta Thunberg, who lead protests at Eurovision that year. A dark satire of Israel’s weaponization of song for hasbara (propaganda) purposes, Sorry uses humour and pop culture to create a mash-up agit-prop in support of the ongoing Eurovision boycott and the Dump Elbit campaign. (Inspired by Toronto Palestine Film Festival’s Gaza Lives tribute to artists lost in the genocide).

Rare USA screening!

Jake (James Raftery) is an apathetic, post-punk vampire who spends his nights cruising seedy music dives for drugged out women to seduce and kill to satisfy his bloodlust. After murdering Zohra, a young Puerto Rican woman, Jake becomes the focus of her brother, Angel, who's desperate to find his missing sister and fears that Jake might be involved in her disappearance...

An ode to East Village sleaze, Jeffrey Arsenault's NIGHT OWL is an unflinchingly gritty modern day vampire story set in a world of dingy, house music playing dive bars, pizza parlors, and other drug and misery filled lower Manhattan locales. Co-starring a young John Leguizamo (The Fan, Summer of Sam) in one his earliest roles, along side Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn, and photographed in deliberately grimy black and white 16mm.

FREE JUNETEENTH SCREENING!

Marlon Riggs, 1995, USA, 87 mins

The final film by filmmaker Marlon Riggs, BLACK IS…BLACK AIN'T, jumps into the middle of explosive debates over Black identity. White Americans have always stereotyped African Americans. But the rigid definitions of "Blackness" that African Americans impose on each other, Riggs claims, have also been devastating. Is there an essential Black identity? Is there a litmus test defining the real Black man and true Black woman?

While BLACK IS…BLACK AIN'T, rejoices in Black diversity, many speakers bare their pain at having been silenced or excluded because they were perceived as "not Black enough" or conversely "too Black." The film marshals a powerful critique of sexism, patriarchy, homophobia, colorism and cultural nationalism in the Black family, church and other Black institutions.

John Cameron Mitchell, 2006, USA, 101 min

This screening is part of the “Fractured Lust” series

An exuberant exploration of life, sex and happiness in New York City, SHORTBUS is the second feature from John Cameron Mitchell which follows an ensemble of artists through underground salons, therapy offices, and downtown apartments as they search for sexual liberation and personal satisfaction.

Jess Franco, 1974, USA/France, 99 min

This screening is part of the “Fractured Lust” series

Haunted by erotic visions, a young woman comes to discover that her sexual possession is the result of a bargain struck nineteen years earlier between her playboy father and an ethereal, pansexual seductress. In a parallel narrative, a visionary doctor tries to unravel the particular form of psychopathia sexualis that torments a beautiful patient. Lorna the Exorcist demonstrates the outer limits the erotic horror film: hallucinatory films with languorous love scenes, drenched with lyrical music, and punctuated with moments of stark horror.

Robert J. Kaplan, 1972, USA, 82 min

Eternal trans icon (and Warhol superstar) Holly Woodlawn is a riot in SCARECROW IN A GARDEN OF CUCUMBERS—a long-lost comedy musical that has been lovingly restored by the Academy Film Archive. Holly stars as a small-town Kansas girl who tries to make it big—or at least find a roommate—in New York City. One of the first features with a trans lead, this joyous valentine to individuality features a supporting role from Warhol scenester Tally Brown and cameos from Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin.

Presenting in collaboration with Sapphic Storytellers. $5 screening with a post-screening discussion!

Deepa Mehta, 1996, India, 108 mins

Considered a queer classic of Asian cinema today, award-winning filmmaker Deepa Mehta’s film Fire was considered the first mainstream Indian film to explore lesbianinism. Sita and Radha are young Indian women in loveless marriages whose husbands choose celibacy or mistresses over their wives. This leads them to form an intimate, passionate relationship amidst a close-minded society. Fire challenges all the foundations in which society is built upon, such as family, marriage, religion and sex.

Robert J. Kaplan, 1972, USA, 82 min

Eternal trans icon (and Warhol superstar) Holly Woodlawn is a riot in SCARECROW IN A GARDEN OF CUCUMBERS—a long-lost comedy musical that has been lovingly restored by the Academy Film Archive. Holly stars as a small-town Kansas girl who tries to make it big—or at least find a roommate—in New York City. One of the first features with a trans lead, this joyous valentine to individuality features a supporting role from Warhol scenester Tally Brown and cameos from Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin.

Shinya Tsukamoto, 2002, Japan, 77 min

This screening is part of the “Fractured Lust” series

From the director of TETSUO: THE IRON MAN, this visually-stunning and coldly-erotic masterpiece features a strange couple, Rinko and Shigehiko, whose physical mismatch is reflected in the complete lack of intimacy between them. They connect as human beings but they live more like friends than as lovers and lead nearly independent lives. Both seem comfortable with this coexistence, but the desires that lurk beneath the surface are brought out with the introduction of a third element (played by Tsukamoto himself) into the equation.

Shinya Tsukamoto, 2002, Japan, 77 min

This screening is part of the “Fractured Lust” series

From the director of TETSUO: THE IRON MAN, this visually-stunning and coldly-erotic masterpiece features a strange couple, Rinko and Shigehiko, whose physical mismatch is reflected in the complete lack of intimacy between them. They connect as human beings but they live more like friends than as lovers and lead nearly independent lives. Both seem comfortable with this coexistence, but the desires that lurk beneath the surface are brought out with the introduction of a third element (played by Tsukamoto himself) into the equation.

Doris Wishman, 2002, USA, 78 min

This screening is part of the “Fractured Lust” series

Roommates Lisa, Beth, and Tess are three young women who each share the same goal of hooking up with their respective male bosses. While their attempts at seduction get off to a rough start, their peeping tom neighbor Billy spends his days spying through keyholes and trying to get a piece of the action. Will these roommates finally make it with their managers? And what about Billy?

Octogenarian filmmaker and “Queen of Sexploitation” Doris Wishman was working at a sex shop in Miami in the early 90s when she met experimental musician Tom Smith (To Live and Shave in L.A.), spurring a full-blown career revival that saw her honored at film festivals around the world and featured on HBO’s Real Sex and Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Intended to be her comeback movie, Dildo Heaven premiered at the New York Underground Film Festival just months before her passing in 2002 and then was never officially widely released until now. A charming shot-on-video sex comedy that defies all description–and surely the only movie by a senior citizen to feature an original rap theme song–Dildo Heaven (also known as Desperate Desires) is a fitting swan song for one of the most beloved cult filmmakers of all time.