A non fiction short film focusing on the intersection of gender transition and racial difference.


A Difference

A stranded dreamer, a bored typist and a defiant transqueerian space captain attempt to rediscover joy in a fantastical #StopAsianHate music video propelled by dance and animation. Outrageously underrepresented in the UK arts, 87% of the creative team were East and/or Southeast Asian or South Asian. Over half were LGBTIQA+, with nearly a third identifying as trans/non-binary/genderqueer. The team included neurodivergent and disabled artists. From the pain of coronaracism and a lifetime of bigotry and invisibility comes this beautiful, fantastical, outspoken, and epic voyage of truth - infusing vivid dance solos, dreamy piano and quirky animated interjections! The track was written by The Mollusc Dimension, a "transqueerian" British Chinese artist and directed by Darius Shu and the artist. Inspired by #StopAsianHate campaigns, solidarity placards by community members and allies also make an appearance, as do paper-mâché "cishet norms" and K-pop-inspired intensity.

Asians Have Feelings Too

(CW: This work contains sensitive content.)

derives its title from Brandon/Teena Brandon of Nebraska, USA, agender-crossing individual who was raped and murdered in 1993 after his female anatomy was revealed. Cheang's project deploys Brandon into cyberspace through multi-layered narratives and images whose trajectory leads to issues of crime and punishment in the cross-section between real and virtual space.

(BRANDON is a live operational piece of 'Internet art', that is designed to be interactive. The video below is a video navigation of the artwork. To experience the work in its intentional form please click 

BRANDON

visualizes a radical trans/queer struggle against the prison industrial complex and toward a world without walls. Remembering that prison breaks are both a theoretical and material practice of freedom, this film imagines what spaces might be opened up if crowbars, wigs, and metal files become tools for transformation. Follow Yoshi, Joy, Susan and Lucy as they fiercely read everything from the Human Rights Campaign and hate crimes legislation to the non-profitization of social movements. 

 grows our collective liberation by working to abolish the multiple ways our hearts, genders, and desires are confined.

Criminal Queers

Michael, a young trans man, returns home to the rural American West after years of estrangement from his parents. 

 explores trans identity, masculinity, and the prices we’re willing to pay for acceptance.

In France Michelle Is a Man's Name

Through beautiful and intimate camerawork, filmmaker Yana Ugrekhelidze illuminates the shadows where many LGBTQ+ people must still reside within their home countries, centering on Alexander, a transgender man forced to live clandestinely in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. 

With no way to change the gender on his passport, Alexander is denied access to a proper job and even professional medical care. Despite such obstacles, his secret life is not one of solitude, living with his doting partner of nearly a decade, Marie—a cis woman—and surrounded by a warm, supportive family who have understood and protected him since childhood.

Winner of the Teddy Jury Award at this year's Berlin International Film Festival, Instructions for Survival is an exquisite and timely documentary portrait featuring outstanding filmmaking craft and a profoundly honest window into one couple’s struggle to live openly.


Alexander’s existence in the margins is untenable. With candour and empathy, Ugrekhelidze follows the couple as they consider seeking asylum in another country—a drastic step that might only be financed if Marie becomes a surrogate mother. In its quietly powerful and deeply humane way, Instructions for Survival captures both the heartbreak and profound joy of ordinary love in extraordinary circumstances.


Instructions for Survival

In May 2005, over 200 sex workers and activists from around the world gathered in Montréal to celebrate the global sex workers' rights movement and the 10th anniversary of Stella.

Entitled Forum XXX, the 4 day event delivered on its promise for an exhilarating and politically inspiring extravaganza. The Forum provided sex workers with an opportunity to get together and raise the power that's needed to fight for sex workers' rights and the decriminalization of prostitution on a global scale.

 is a 15 minute film that reflects on the sex workers rights movement. It provides a glimpse into the Forum XXX, where sex workers' discussions, demands, and struggles for human rights took centre stage.

Live eXXXpressions: Sex Workers Stand Up

A working-class, residential area in south London, Brixton is characterized by its multicultural population. In the 1980s, there was racist police violence against its Black residents, which led to a riot. In her performance, Mona Hatoum refers to these political events: the Dr. Martens, which she dragged through the neighborhood’s streets, were traditionally worn by the British police. Like a dark shadow, the boots seem to follow the barefoot artist, who seems naked and vulnerable. The black, lace-up Dr. Martens boots were not only part of police officers’ uniforms but were also worn by punks and skinheads. In the context of this performance, the shoes embody a system of control, violence, and oppression against which the individual is defenseless. In her video film Roadworks, Hatoum has condensed the 30-minute plus eponymous performance into a 6’45” cinematic collage that primarily focuses on the audience’s reaction.

Roadworks

 tells the story of Billy, a racist angst-ridden skinhead, and his violent love affair with Marcia, a West Indian woman. A raw, poetic account of violent love and redemption. Screenplay by Sarah Kane, directed by Vincent O'Connell.

Skin

When Mac, a young butch Latina, dies, her girlfriend, Hope, must overcome both personal grief and homophobic hostilities from Mac’s family in order to respectfully send Mac off into the afterlife as she would’ve wanted.

Vámonos

 is an essay film comprised of layers and hybrid cartographies: I aim to question, although abstractly, the masculinisation of gender, especially in the context of being an immigrant in europe. 

I demand accountability by european states and I demand accountability by whiteness, by my own people, by model minorities. I try to embody the feelings of dysphoria that are imposed upon us as racialised people, and how being trans is both an escape and something you can’t touch, something i don’t want to talk about. I body-build in order to not be, I body-build the same way I use the internet, the same way the internet is an infinite murky duplication. The film traces histories within West Asia, through histories of colonisation via the Ottoman, Russian and Persian Empires, arriving in the Soviet Union and across to the present Post Soviet and Post Colonial stance. Many of the ideas expressed in the film I brewed up during moments of transition while we were living in Berlin, experiencing very liberal european ‘tolerant’ types of racisms and transphobias.

Categories

Discrimination