MIX is pleased to present this year’s festival, our 21st, at our newest MIX Factory@Seaport, located in the heart of the South Street Seaport district. We are especially proud to open this festival with a diverse sampling of experimental and challenging film & video, ranging from documentary to dance & music inspired videos, from appropriated historical film to video animated stills. Like the diverse landscape of New York’s Seaport district, where the historical merges with the present and man-made waterfalls grace nature’s East River, where the Brooklyn Bridge united two distinct cities 125 years ago, these films and videos all explore landscapes in one form or another…cultural, historical, emotional, physical, domestic and even post-apocalyptic. Welcome to MIX 21. Curated by the festival programming committee. TRT: 93 minutes!

All Women Are Equal Marguerite Paris, 1971, USA/UK, 16mm, B&W, optical sound, 15 min. This very early and non-exploitative representation of an ordinary well-adjusted transgendered person is historically significant for its treatment of the subject. While other films may have depicted drag queens and other performers (such as Frank Simon’s 1968 feature The Queen), they were not made by a woman. Tonight we present a gorgeous new print, the inaugural project of Memorizing MIX, our film preservation program. We began the project in 2006, choosing the neglected work of Marguerite Paris, who cooperated with our effort until her sudden death in February 2007. In this film, made on outdated East German film stock, Paris films her friend. She wrote very simply “Paula, also known as Paul, is a TV I met in London in 1971. I had to tell his/her story.” Also unique is that Paris produced, directed, shot and edited this film, which, unlike these other representations, allows the individual to tell her own personal story, without resorting to spectacle or focusing on performativity. Through Paris’s lens, we see Paula fixing her make up and discussing the difficulty of living as a woman and meeting other trans people. The discussion is remarkably detailed and offers incredible insights into both the time and Paula’s individual psyche. The preservation of this film was funded in part by New York Women in Film & Television and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. The labwork was performed at Cinema Arts (headed by Janice Allen, herself an MTF), the new titles were made by BB Optics, and the soundtrack was made at Trackwise.

For A Relationship Jim Verburg, 2007, Canada, video, color, sound, 4 min. Using 2 years of still photographs, Verberg intersects life with art in this visually daring diaristic piece reflecting on a life lived so far… vacations, sexual exploits, familial ties and romantic encounters.

Cut & Paste Alexis McCrimmon, 2007, USA, video, color, sound, 8:30 min. An eye-catching and playful autobiographical documentary explores the historical contexts of racial stereotypes, gender identity and sexual agency i.e: what it meant for one little girl who dared to be black, queer, and kinky.

Five Haikus for the New York City Subway Za Martohardjono, 2008, USA, Super8, color, silent, 1:30 min. World Premiere Five haikus are set against kaleidoscopic images of the NYC subway, a welcome contradiction to the reality of New York’s crowded and very loud underground system.

CUSPS Sara Zia Ebrahimi, 2008, USA, video, color, sound, 15 min. Paralleling changes in the city of Philadelphia with those in her own life, Iranian-American filmmaker Sara Zia Ebrahimi explores her experiences living as an urban nomad, migrant and immigrant in the post-industrial landscape of Philadelphia neighborhoods.

My Name is Pochsy: An Industrial Film Karen Hines, 2008, Canada, Super8 transferred to video, B&W, sound, 7 min. NY Premiere Pochsy (pronouned “Poxy” as in “the pox,” also an anagram for “Psycho”), a mercury-addled waif, muses on life, death, karmic reckoning and the future of the human soul in this subversively comedic ode to a century of industrial film propaganda, and a mindful attack on mindless progress. Musical score by Tony Award-winner Greg Morrison (The Drowsy Chaperone).

Is What Was Jerry Tartaglia, 2008, USA/Germany, video, color, sound, 23 min. World Premiere “The initial design of this film involved the documentation of sound and image to examine formulations of queer identity, rather than to recreate the imaginary. The Holocaust and the anti-gay hatred by the Nazis is not imaginary. It is what was. That hate is still alive today in America, albeit in a state of remission.” — J. Tartaglia. This experimental document examines queer cultural amnesia and begs us to recall the adage “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

My Name Is Harvey Milk (And I’m Here to Recruit You) Leonardo Herrera, 2008, USA, video, color, sound, 5 min. NY Premiere This psychedelic short comprised of disturbing magnified landscape of the suit Harvey Milk wore the night of his assassination with spliced audio of Milk’s political will recorded shortly before his death, is a moving tribute to Milk’s legacy of activism. Harvey Milk’s suit appears courtesy of the International GLBT Historical Society.

Freak Girls Tamara Vukov, 2004, Canada, video, B&W, sound, 4 min. NY Premiere Hurry, hurry step this way, the strangest sights on the island! Knife-throwers, burlesque dancers, lady boxers, trapeze performers, beauty queens, female contortionists. Remixing public-domain archival footage of Coney Island and early vaudeville performers from the Prelinger and American Memory Archives, Freak Girls is a tribute, both playful and haunting, to some of the women who pioneered the art of female spectacle.

Pour Sinclair Maxime Brouillet, 2007, Canada, 16mm, color & B&W, sound, 6 min. An erotic and captivating ode to the freedom of touch and emotion.

Perfect Kiss Derek Jackson, 2007, USA, video, color, sound, 6 min. “I had a one night stand three years ago that I can’t stop thinking about. I didn’t disclose my HIV status. I was so nervous about disclosing that I couldn’t get a hard on so I let him fuck me instead. He used a condom. But afterwards I wanted to get to know him. I didn’t feel I had the right to ask anything because I hadn’t disclosed. He walked out the door and I’ve never seen him since. All I know is that his name is Mike. I’ve taken thousands of self-portraits as a sort of art therapy to help take my mind off of ‘that night.’ I made a slide show out of a selection of the images and set them to my favorite song called Perfect Kiss by New Order. There’s a line in the song that goes ‘tonight I should have stayed at home playing with my pleasure zone.’ This video is my pleasure zone.”

In Every Dream Home a Heartache John Caffery, 2008, Canada, video, color, sound, 3 min. Kids on TV and Johannes Zits collaborated on this music video art piece. The video takes the song’s plotline of a rich man falling in love with a rubber doll and uses it to critique queer consumerism and gay-demographic advertising resulting in the subversion of desire into fetishization of new condos and lavish furnishings. KOTV’s John Caffery portrays the green-screen-painted rubber doll wearing the gay-porn projection by Johannes, while KOTV’s Minus Smile sings the part of the protagonist whose alienation eventually drives him mad.