As I create my movies, this is what I’m thinking about

Anti-racist, feminist justice requires creating socially shared affective receptivity, not merely ideological nor cognitive openness.

The fantasy of “economic self-reliance” is predicated on privileging white, properties interests and restricting public resources for their own use

Ethical witnessing seeks to make justice irresistible and white supremacy intolerable.

Racism is perpetually insecure and anxious, despite economic,  racial, national and gender dominance.

Depoliticization of racial struggles meant protest against exclusion and exploitation were reformatted as acts of crime against the nation.

Neoliberalism would have us individualize problems rather than make fundamental changes.

Justice is not a static thing we achieve once and for all. It is something that has to be persistently struggled for on the basis of shared principles as conditions change.

But we are comforted and motivated by the fact that at the very least, we try to abide by our principles. We do this imperfectly and always incompletely. When we try not to engage in the labor of hatred, denial, disavowal, guilt, and projection, when we reveal lies repeated by white heteropatriarchal supremacy, when we do not reject the fact that we are all complicit in systems of denigration and destruction in some way, when we do not shy away from our social and political responsibility to end oppression – that is when the process of struggling for justice begins to offer an unchartered sense of liberation, an unlegislated experience of freedom, and a mutually interdependent place to belong.

Thinking from my dear sister/friend, Dr. Paula Ioanide

 

Mickey or Minnie on LatestTV in Brighton

Indie FilmOnTV – Pride Month Special from Latest TV on Vimeo.

My short movie about being accosted by Minnie Mouse at the entrance to the women’s bathroom has graciously been included in a program of short films curated by Deborah Espect of Brighton, UK. You can watch the short and an interview online:

Available to watch on Latest TV in the Brighton area on Freeview 7 and Virgin Media 159, and to livestream anywhere in the world at thelatest.co.uk

EPISODE 6
Wednesday 7th June 2023– 9.50pm  (that’s 4:50 pm EST)
Wednesday 21st June 2023– 9pm  (4:00 pm EST)

For I am Dead by Patricia Delso Lucas
In late 1800s Europe, Oscar, a wealthy but lonely middle-aged man who has lived an extravagant life in a chateau, confesses love to his gardener Jude before he dies of his excesses.
patriciadelsolucas.com

Mickey or Minnie by Krissy Mahan
A gender non-conforming person walks towards a restroom and only Minnie Mouse can “protect” the children. Based on the director’s real-life experience, this short film reenacts how a huge Disney character kept them from using the public restroom of their choice.

Let’s Celebrate DIY Movies at the Cinema Museum!

Hello Friends! Please join me at London’s Cinema Museum on 2 March 2023 for an amazing reunion of filmmakers and festival organizers. Look how far we’ve come! Since the first Wotever DIY Film Festival (my first one was 2013) so many brilliant festivals began, many of them connected somehow to the Wotever DIY Film Festival. My fondest wish is that we can all have some time together, and no one will have to be running a festival, we will all just be hanging out.

Here are the details:

2 March 2023  18:00 – 2200  (plenty of time to socialize!)
Cinema Museum The Master’s House, 2 Dugard Way (off Renfrew Road), London SE11 4TH

Photos with Kyla Harris, Tara Brown, Theresa Heath, Charlie Little and Helen Wright at BFI Southwark at the “Busting The Bias Opening Night: Is There Anybody Out There? An Illustrated Talk + ECLECTIC: Shorts Programme, an evening celebrating disability visibility and filmmaking. 3 March 2023. A group photo with 4 people, indoors at an event smiling a the camera, from left to right: Theresa Heath, Tara Brown, Charlie Little and Helen Wright.

Autumn 2022

Hello friends!

I realize it’s been a minute since I updated this, there has been a lot going on in my life.  And I’m happy to say there was a lot going on with my movies, too. (glad I am not a live performer, couldn’t have done it).

Here’s what’s been happening:

Mickey or Minnie (upcoming!)

November 5, 2022 Leeds International Film Festival, Leeds, UK

#DaughterFail (upcoming!)

October 12, 2022 Queer Film Festival Munich, Munich, Germany.

Mickey or Minnie screenings:

August 7, 2022 FilmPride – Brighton & Hove Pride LGBTQ+ Film Festival, Brighton, UK.
June 19-26, 2022 QFlix Philadelphia,  Philadelphia, PA USA. Selected but the festival was cancelled
September 20, 2022 Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest, London, UK.
June 10, 2022,  Splice Film Fest, Brooklyn, NY – Won Honorable Mention

My Crazy Boxers screenings:

September 28, 2022 GAZE International LGBTQ+ Film Festival, Dublin, Ireland

Carol screenings:

August 8, 2022 Toronto Indie Filmmakers Festival, Canada. Award Winner for Animation
July 5, 2022 PRIDEFILM.online International Online Film Festival

My Aunt Mame screenings:

August 28, 2022 San Francisco Queer Film Festival,  San Francisco, CA

Short film programs:

Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest: programmed in “Not Gay as in Happy, But Queer As In…” with:

Hello my name is Sarah | dir. Sarah Hill | USA 2022 | 10′
Dildo Riot | dir. Maria Katsikadakou | Greece 2021 | 9′
Latrinalia | dir. Sophie Broadgate | UK 2022 | 4’
Portrait of Oasissy on Fire | dir. Annabel Cooper | UK 2020 | 3’
Victor’s Body | dir. Victor Di Marco, Márcio Picoli | Brazil 2021 | 15’
The zip of my pants is open. Like my heart. | dir. Marie Luise Lehner | Austria 2022 | 28’
Mickey or Minnie | dir. krissy mahan | USA 2022 | 2’
Nails & Beauty | dir. Rhona Foster | UK 2021 | 10′
Dippers & Oysters | dir. Kai Fiáin | UK 2022 | 10′
Ripples | dir. Dylan Mitro | Canada 2022 | 18’

Queer Film Festival Munich:  programmed in “Queer Mixtape” with:
Warsha
Dania Bdeir—FRA,LBN—2022—16min
Fireflies (Lucciole)
Pauline Curnier Jardin—ITA—2022—7min
#DaughterFail
Krissy Mahan—USA—2022—5min
The Pass
Pepi Ginsberg—USA—2022—15min
Egúngún (Masquerade)
Olive Nwosu—NIG—2021—15min
Starfuckers
Antonio Marziale—USA—2022—14min
Sexfluencing
Matus Krajnak—GBR 2022—20min

San Franciso Queer Film Festival: programmed in “Animated” with:
Refugee Arrival – Peter Hopkins
My Aunt Mame – krissy mahan
Lovie Dovie – FRANCESCA BRESCIA
Stickup Winter Orgy – EE Newman
Embrace – LATESHA MERKEL

GAZE LGBT Film Fest – Dublin Programmed in “Making and Unmaking”

Masc.ing
Dir. Marcus Gambrill/ Ireland / 2016 / 3m
Masc.ing uses a music video format, drawing from 90s MTV aesthetics as well as everyday domestic objects that can be perceived as queer, to explore a transition from boy to man.
Angelo
Dir. Alejandro Plumb/ Plurinational State of Bolivia / 2022 / 9m
Set in the Andean nation of Bolivia, Angelo is about a shoeshine boy who uses the power of his imagination to escape the harsh reality of life on the street.
DIRECTOR’S SPOTLIGHT: A small unique masterpiece melding documentary footage with a stylised narrative, stunning colour and visual tableaux. GT.
A body is a body is a body
Dir. Cat and Éiméar McClay/ Ireland / 2021 / 12m
Language folds and falls in on itself in this new video work by artist duo Cat and Éiméar McClay. Animated 3D tableaus of Catholic paraphernalia and strikes of elemental weather accompany the words. Together, they enact the historically fraught relationship between queerness and the Catholic church.
Call me Jonathan
Dir. B´rbara Lago/ Argentina / 2021 / 8m
After finding video material of her childhood, the director reprogrammes her mythology as an infant and reflects on her body traversed by affections, fictions and years.
From a Spaceless Within
Dir. Matthew LaPaglia/ USA / 2021 / 20m
Compositing past and future, truth and fiction, From a Spaceless Within approaches the construction and dematerialization of the artist while asking where our intentions take root when we attempt to create anything at all.
a story that doesn’t have to do with me
Dir. Kymberly McDaniel/ USA / 2021
As I seek to connect with my partner about their research in bioarchaeology, a conversation emerges about survival and what is left behind after death.
My Crazy Boxers
Dir. Krissy Mahan/ USA / 2019 / 9m
Suicidal, or just a working class queer caught in the wrong underpants? Pixellated fragments slowly materialise in this powerful and distressing video based on actual meetings with hospital staff while in a psychiatric hospital system.
One Magenta Afternoon
Dir. Vernon Jordan, III/ USA / 2021 / 8m
The lesson is love: when Pop Pop and his grandson, Les, play jazz, they summon six queer spirits and tumble through their memories.
FORT
Dir. Ryan Harman, Craig Hunter/ USA / 2021 / 8m
Two boyfriends wander beaches near New York City, finding shade under crude shelters they build with sheets, rubber bands, and materials (like driftwood) scavenged from the shore.

 

 

Summer 2022

Hello!  It’s been quite the year so far.  My little movies seem so inadequate to stand against all the horrors, but I will continue to fight with whatever i’ve got.  So …

Upcoming Screenings: 

FilmPride: August 6-7, 2022, Brighton & Hove, UK. Mickey or Minnie During the Brighton & Hove Pride weekend on 6th and 7th August, the FilmPride festival will take place in Preston Park, the beating heart of every year’s event.  My movie will screen in the We Are Fabuloso program.

Screenings since the spring:

Splice: June 25-26, 2022, Brooklyn, NY, USA.  Mickey or Minnie won an Honorable Mention during the festival, held at the beautiful and historic Film Noir Cinema in Greenpoint.

QFlix: Philadelphia, PA, USA:  Due to government ineptness, QFlix’s non-profit status expired, and so they were not able to produce the festival this year.  They had selected Mickey or Minnie to screen there, in my local film festival, so i am sad about that.

Translations: Seattle Transgender Film Festival, Seattle, WA, USA

 

Spring 2022 Screenings

Amid an absurd world, some of my movies are being shown at festivals.  I offer them in the spirit of hope and healing.

Translations: Seattle Transgender Film Festival, May 5-8, 2022. “Mickey or Minnie” World Premiere.
In the “Blender” program:  Mix an ounce of puppetry, a dash of sorcery, two cups of mythological baby, six grams of Minnie Mouse, a whisper of archival footage, one vial of testosterone, and a capful of the subconscious. Pour into a vessel of your choice. Sprinkle with a vigilante cowgirl and garnish with youthful optimism. (Full program below)

 

May 26-29, 2022,  Cinema Systers Film Festival  will be showing “#DaughterFail”

Translations Film Festival “Blender” program:

BLACKOUT:  Milo Clairmont (he/him); 2021; USA; 3 min.In this digital animation, a young trans man faced with fatigue and depersonalization embarks on a journey through his subconscious. In the process, he is forced to confront the painful source of his despair.
BALLAD OF YUKA:  GJ Pelczar; 2021; USA; 4 minIn this surrealist, stop motion, acid western, a vigilante cowgirl comes to town with one goal: taking down a mysterious outlaw.
MICKEY OR MINNIE:  Krissy Mahan; 2022; USA; 2 min.A gender nonconforming person is policed by Minnie Mouse en route to the restroom.
HELLO MY NAME IS SARA:  Sarah Hill (they/them); 2022; USA; 10 min.This mixed media compilation featuring puppetry, paper dolls, and archival footage seeks to answer the age-old question; what’s in a name? The film explores the moments of awkwardness, humor, and self-actualization that come with settling into your name.
IMAGINE A BODY:  Connor O’Keefe (he/him); 2021; USA; 8 min.This immersive mixed media documentary undulates through a range of emotions as it reflects  on the physical, social, and emotional experiences of taking testosterone.
CHILD OF POLYCRITUS – Audio Descriptive Version Available:  Lauren John Joseph (they/them); 2021; UK; 18 min.A witty, effervescent historiography in which a mythological baby, nail salon, and cinema-goers collide as their self-articulated genders link them through time and space.
POPPETS:  Maz Murray (they/them); 2022, UK; 16 min.An absurdist soap opera that spans four generations, a housing development malpractice suit, and just a dash of sorcery.
MAMA HAS A MUSTACHE”.
Sally Rubin (she/her); 2021; USA; 10 min.This film combines audio interviews of young children, clip-art, and mixed media to create a world outside the gender binary, a world often easier for children to see.
TO THE FUTURE WITH LOVE:  Shaleece Haas (she/her); USA; 6 min.Hunter “Pixel” Jimenez, a 19 year old, nonbinary, Guatamalan just wants to live happily ever after with his long-distance boyfriend in this endearing animated self-portrait.

Early 2022 and going strong

 

February 2, 2022:  “Carol” was a finalist for an award at the Rome Short Film Festival. My first screening in Italy! Wouldn’t that be great if i could go to these???

 

 

I’m humbled and happy to return to the Tag! Queer Short Film Festival in Portland, OR.  My film is showing as part of “The Unknown” program on February 24, 2022.  Screening with:
Official Selections: The Unknown

Al Atlal
Raed Rafei

April in her Mind
Willow Skye-Biggs

Drag Queens Must Die!
Robby Kendall

丑角  [Dramatic]
Yang Rong

For Jean
Eritria Pitts

Have You Ever Thought Why
Krissy Mahan

IS THIS LIBERATION?
M.O. Guzman

Lana Kaiser
Philipp Gufler

That Piece of You
Jessica Barr

November – December 2021 screnings

I’m so proud to have been selected for the Third Edition of the Burnt Video Art and Experimental Film Festival.  My work was included in Burnt 3.4, which shows in November 2021.

From Burnt Video Art and Experimental Film Festival 3.4 “Crown Branches” program:
Rites and othering

To be on the wrong side of the lens. On the margins of a memory, a story, a social construct. To explore through intimate and symbolic portraits, one’s foundational story, sexuality, trauma and healing.

Six short films are part of the latest program for Burnt Fest’s third edition. Films that revolve around parental relationships, transgenerational fears, identity and impulses and try to make sense, through gestures of peeling, of smoothing, of confrontation of characters, their journey of different realizations.

Remembering only the photographs in their materiality while stripping them from their surroundings, the photographs become more vivid than the lived memories.

“To find the day of 21st” by Kieko Ikehata, explores the memory taken over by images, by photographs that erase what isn’t in them and limit one’s past to bits and pieces of what remains seen. It examines how recorded images can become more vivid than our original memory, an impure historical evidence.

The time when a photograph is taken, a photograph is seen and then the time when it’s looked at again.

How much can one rely on the photographs? And how does one make sure a day is remembered when it does not have a signifier? Ikehata’s film is a mixture of archives and landscapes but also the narrator’s memories and those of their mother. A blend of past and present where mother/daughter realities, memories and their physical existence in a space in different times, intertwine.

The overlap in Masha Vlasova’s “Her Type”, is that between the filmmaker and their father. By the manipulation of a photograph through a masculinizing application, Masha now resembles her dad. The space between the mother’s gaze and the photograph on the phone becomes that of a romantic recollection, a longing for a deceased lover. A space where intimate desires surface and tension between the subject and the camera is palpable.

Where the object of desire is digitally fabricated in “Her type”, the object of fear is genetically transmitted in Nat Portnoy’s “42 Dni/ 42 Days”. Portoy’s film is that of confrontation of the self, not only with the disease but also with her surroundings. It is a body on the margins trying to accept its fate and desires, wondering if they are one’s own. How can one feel at home in the world when they feel failed by their body and lineage and through their visual diary, try to regain control?

Such is also the case of “Letter to my mother” by Amina Maher. A work of art consisted of many layers being stripped and shaved and peeled, where the protagonist tries to regain control over their narrative and trauma.

Amina Maher’s relationship with her mother had already been captured on film by Abbas Kiarostami in Ten. In one of the scenes, Amina as a child expresses that “we must grow up before we belong to ourselves”. When sexual abuse is denounced in “Letter to my mother”, those words hold the grown ups accountable of their failure to protect as well as their denial in order to preserve the spectacle of normalcy.

In “1975 of my mother and me” by Jun-Yuan Hong, this spectacle of marital bliss under patriarchal domination is questioned by the filmmaker who tries to merge memories and fictional narrative in order to make sense of, or question and critique a past. The film unfolds as vignettes of a woman’s life, through which we feel the impotence and inability to change one’s fate as if driven by external forces in addition to traditions and customs .

A fate manipulated by some external hand, such as in #DaughterFail by Krissy Mahan in which the small characters are gliding through the screen on a piece of paper navigating a preconceived path that situates them in a bigger narrative.

November 2021
c.partamian

***************************************

Also November 2021:
Gilbert Baker Film Festival 24 November – 12 December 2021

2021 Gilbert Baker Film Festival offers specially curated LGBTQ+ content including mixed short film programs, feature-length film screenings, moderated live watch parties, Q&As and plenty of opportunities for audience engagement.

Each week of live programming will accommodate for different global regions/time zones to extend the reach and accessibility of this festival as per the vision of the festival to connect people and reach marginalized, isolated, rural LGBTQIIA+, Sapphic, Achillean, or Diamoric communities worldwide. 

Queer Films for Palestine – support the cultural boycott

As you know, I am a white settler on Lenapehoking. Also, I deplore that the profit of my labor goes to the aparthied state of Isreal’s illegal occupation of Palestine.  I support the cultural boycott of Isreal, and support movements to divest from Israel and to impose sanctions against Israel.

I am humbled and thrilled to announce that a group of excellent people put together this event in a very short period of time.   Join us on November 19th, 2021, 7:00pm,  at the Rotunda in West Philly for a night of films and a panel discussion about pinkwashing.

Tickets here

Queer Cinema for Palestine – Philly

Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) is a Palestinian-led movement for freedom, justice and equality. BDS upholds the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity.

Israel is occupying and colonising Palestinian land, discriminating against Palestinian citizens of Israel and denying Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes. Inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement, the BDS call urges action to pressure Israel to comply with international law.

BDS is now a vibrant global movement made up of unions, academic associations, churches and grassroots movements across the world. Since its launch in 2005, BDS is having a major impact and is effectively challenging international support for Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.

Skip to content