ALL THIS PAIN AND POWER

Alchemy Film & Arts

Using film as a way to come together, have conversations and strengthen community.

WELCOME > SCHEDULE > SCREENINGS > SHORTS > ALL THIS PAIN AND POWER

HEART OF HAWICK
FRIDAY 29 APRIL
10:00 – 11:15 / 71’ + Introduction

This programme is captioned and also available online 29 April – 2 May.

Guest curator Gary Varro, Founder and Artistic Director of Queer City Cinema in Regina, Saskatchewan, will be present to introduce the programme.

Content warning: some flashing imagery; depiction of physical threat, physical restraint, blood, suffocation, self-harm, fire, mature language, needles, nudity, scenes of a sexual nature, surgery, hospital, medical paraphernalia, religious imagery, animal death; discussion of homophobia, sexism, childhood trauma, pregnancy loss, racism.

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Gary Varro

‘The dirt and the damage, all this pain and power…’
— Polycephaly in D, Michael Robinson

This programme of seven works by Queer-identified filmmakers underscores the unsettling dimensions of human relationships private and public, and speaks to both a refusal to concede and the possibilities of creating spaces of empowerment and resolution.

ariella tai’s cavity considers several mainstream and cult representations of interracial relationships between Black women and white men, and reshapes narratives in which Black women are hurt, abused and abandoned to instead centre upon agency, righteous anger and revenge. T.T. Takemoto’s Ever Wanting (for Margaret Chung) envisions the euphoria and despair of Margaret Chung, San Francisco’s first Chinese-American female physician, and her insatiable desire for women and celebrity through her forays into drugs, sapphic surgeries, and queer flights of fancy.

Created through the exhaustive collection and categorisation of found footage from specific twentieth-century film sources, Dara Gelman’s Hand of Power mines the liminal space between dream and reckoning, between instrument and agency, and between learning and memory – interrogating both present-day and retrospective cultural narratives about gender. In Two Sons and a River of Blood by Amber Bemak and Angelo Madsen Minax, a queer woman is pregnant. As a parallel emerges between the pregnant body and the trans body, the techno-sex act becomes the key and a pyramid becomes the portal to access this other world of non-bodied existence.

Rob Fatal’s Fluid Bound is an experimental gender fluid, Mestizo-Indigenous film that uses text, sound design, crude animation and bondage rope to meditate on the complex, generations-old relationships and battles between our skin and our souls. Vika Kirchenbauer’s UNTITLED SEQUENCE OF GAPS ponders the effects of the invisible and the power inherent in shifting violence beyond visibility, while simultaneously reflecting upon the digital archives and technologies that help shape the contemporary human’s relation to past, present and future. Polycephaly in D, by Michael Robinson, evokes existential drift in an age of rupture. Leaping, falling, and meeting your new self in an earthquake. Losing one’s head, growing another.

PROGRAMME