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.

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 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).

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.

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.

Live 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.

Horace Ové, United Kingdom, 1975, 126 mins

Horace Ové’s fiction-film debut marks a watershed in the history of British cinema: the nation’s first feature to be written and directed by a Black filmmaker and the first to focus on the perspective of Black characters. Ové and novelist Sam Selvon’s gritty script centers on teenage Tony (Herbert Norville), caught between his Trinidadian parents’ (Lucita Lijertwood and Frank Singuineau) desire to attain middle-class respectability in London and his older brother Colin’s (Oscar James) urging to join the Black Power movement. After encountering racism while hanging out with a white girl and searching for employment, Tony finds comradeship with a group of aimless Caribbean boys, only to discover that their petty criminality is a dead end. Ové depicts Tony’s subsequent political awakening in captivating vérité style as he realizes that taking on the system will invite not only violent police oppression but also a thorough examination of his own values and beliefs. Suffused with the political outrage and explosive rebellion of 1970s London, Pressure is a marvel of lived-in independent filmmaking that captures Black working-class solidarity while refusing easy solutions to social problems—like income disparity, juvenile delinquency, racial profiling—that remain relevant today.

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.

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

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.

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.

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, 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