Travel films have an established format with their own conventions, history and baggage. It is a medium that has all too often sought to control, define and dictate perceptions of ‘other’ places. Comprised of footage shot while travelling on group excursions across Russia in 2019, 

 is an attempt to draw out the ethical restrictions of a travelogue, while questioning how (and why) to make one. At times there is an awkward tourist-gaze, aware of its outsider position. But as a self-reflexive work that considers its own creation, it ultimately unravels, as the artist rationalises themselves out of a particular way of working, inviting the viewer into their uncertainty.

An Uncountable Number of Threads

 music video features soundscapes and footage from immersing ourselves in nature as we ground in our souls as bodies existing outside of isolation, capitalism, gender dysphoria, and the prison state. 

 was written together at the top of a mountain in Happy Valley in Tongva Land, so-called East Los Angeles at Sarita Doe and Champoy yurt dwelling ceremony.



 unearths diasporic queer spirituality and harnesses our ancestral languages - Urdu and Kapampangan.



 is a prayer to honor the bonds of our love that expands and brings regeneration into our multiverse. 

 is a spell to inspire deeper connections to our Earth and welcome in freedom and joy for ourselves and kin.

corporations own our water, pushed out BIPOC farmers, and tourism poisoned the salton sea. as water protectors we must bloom new beginnings.


BLOOM

 is a poetic examination of how trauma reverberates through the years. A voice speaks, sometimes sings, sometimes fails to say. It is trying to address the points at which various confusions meet and link, in an articulated chain or a ripple. When a discussion of trauma isn’t centred on its origin, the aftermath can play out.


Here, the water facilitates a looking across time, mirrors and windows, as well as gaps and blank spots. A sort of portal, upon which bodily evidence materialises. The voice is sense-making, it maps and unpicks, it looks to teenagers, to suburbia, to middle England, to queer futures, to healing.


 exists both as a kind of haunting, and as a means of dealing with being haunted.

Compliance

In the COVID-19 pandemic, mirrored fatality transverses through planet earth as international multi-hyphenated artists & farmers. 

 is an eco apocalyptic survival hit to fortify themselves towards food sovereignty & the collapse of the exploitative surveillance state. 

 is a prayer and their reflections from leaving the concrete jungle and restoring in sacred lands, regenerative farms, community gardens, and QTBIPOC (Queer Trans Black Indigenous People of Color) sanctuary projects on Indigenous land. 

 is an immersive journey about how we are stripped from our ancestral lands and pushed into cities suffering from COVID-19, food apartheid, the police state, and environmental racism.

chand is heartbroken by human biome(trics)’ destruction on yatu

overshadowed by grief, chand refuses to align with yatu

without chand and yatu's lunar eclipse and gravitational pull

yatu's brain coral reefs no longer spawn sanctuaries for a naiad

forests of joint pines suffer from dehydration

and cannot weep pollinating droplets to nourish a patia’nak gubat

naiad and patia’nak gubat communicate their impending extinction through marine fungi and mycelium root messaging

naiad and patia’nak gubat conjure chand and yatus’ metamorphosis by intertwining in cocoon webs ritual

patia’nak gubat and naiad’s cocoon webs realign chand and yatu’s orbit for revolutions to come

chand’s light embraces yatu’s biosphere and their bond regenerates patia’nak gubat, naiad, and all earthbody(s)

EARTHBODY(S)_BIOME(TRICS)

Trans-masculine and pregnant in the mid-1990s, Joaquín moves from the city to the anonymity of a 200-year-old colonial farm house in the hill towns of Western Massachusetts (Pocumtuc territory), working as a customer service operator for a local herbal company. Joaquín discovers a shapeshifting spirit guide in a tree nearby their home. 

The spirit's presence permeates the old house as Joaquín awaits their due date. Joaquín's water breaks two weeks early and a precipitous labor ensues. Is this spirit haunting or guiding Joaquín as they await their midwife?

Winner of the 2020 Best in Show Short Film, Boston LGBTQ+ Film Festival

Light on a Path 

Real boys skinny-dip, fight with swords and learn to masturbate together. At least that’s how the young men in 

imagine the boyhood they feel they were cheated out of. 

They are transgender, and now, as adults, they have decided to explore male identity formation in Northern Europe’s last wilderness. They have brought along a tent, gas fires and a slightly too clichéd list of all the things they need to experience on an educational journey that turns out to put their loving friendship to the test – and forces them into a modern existential battle in the middle of the nature they have otherwise always felt betrayed by.

Silence and Sword

What does it mean to listen while being vulnerable? Taking the concept "music as a gift", four Berlin-based migrant queer musicians surprised their close friends or relatives with a special song, which then triggered a moment of deep appreciation between them. 

This film documents that process of them opening up, becoming vulnerable and letting go - with conversations about their marginalized kinship, trust, fluidity and fragility of life. Together they find comfort and "reverberations" (physical phenomenon) of their sounds in each other.

Sonic Reverbs

In collaboration with ecologist Dr. Nalini Nadkarni, artist-ﬁlmmaker April Lin 林森 presents ‘TR333’, a speculative documentary which imagines a new species of tree based on scientiﬁc literature on plants and climate hardiness.
Their hybrid forms and body parts are a patchwork amalgamation of different tree types, this tree is a climate adaptative response, a lifeform born out of resilience and hope. As the spirit inhabiting the tree emerges to converse with the viewer, they share with us their experiences of ecocidal generational trauma, urging us to reﬂect around the ways all the beings on the planet are deeply interlinked, and to honour our collective responsibility towards one another. Using a blend of 3D animation, found footage, and a musical score based on data soniﬁcation, ‘TR333’ uses the speculative to recast the ecological crisis, asking ‘Why is this important?’ from a multispecies and affective gaze.


Commissioned by Sheﬃeld DocFest and supported by Wellcome.

TR333

Over Memorial Day weekend in 1996, filmmaker, activist and camper Anne Chamberlain turned her camera on the holiday happenings at The Pit, a lake-side, LGBTQ campground in southern Illinois. With The Pit’s gregarious owner proprietors, Hal and Billy, as her guide, Chamberlain captures a moment in its decades-long history creating community one barbecue at a time.

Tales of the Pit

 fluctuates between fast and slow movements and methodologies of queer intimacy and lamentations of this idea of the home in relation to the queer body and vice versa.

My practice as of late has mainly centred around a science fictionalised exploration into trans-masc dyke-iness; a queer movement and bodily abjection in regards to searching for modes of home and unhomliness not based upon patrilineal spatialities of biological kinship. This has taken the form of a moving image work that “functions” as a sort of container, or maybe a digitised and chaotic sonic and video collage in which I have been
particularly focusing on the specifics of transition (pun intended); the harsh cut or fluid, pixelated merging of various clips. This has culminated in a piece of work that fluctuates between fast and slow movements and methodologies of queer intimacy and lamentations of this idea of the home in relation to the queer body and vice versa.

The Space Dykes and Other Adventures

We hiked a bridge to nowhere and at the end were metal locks scratched with names to symbolize eternal love. We gazed at a vale in the middle of forest mountains with a river vortex flowing to nourish the four corners of the farming town: Negra (so-called Blanca), Murcia, Spain with its abundant lemons, grapes, olives, and oranges. Down below were dogs, baby sharks, ducks, butterflies, and murmurations.

 is a tale honoring the world building created when moments of reciprocal, trusting, and sacred love for our lovers and the lands we protect & steward are prioritized and fought for.

 contains field recordings of our immersion during our residency at Centro Negra with AADK Spain: the church bell that rings every hour, the 2022 New Years countdown, parades, farms, climbing the top of Valle de Ricote, and the industrial dam at the center of Negra.

VALE

Based on a text message from their Kokum (grandma), the artist imagines planting seeds for future generations.

Will Flowers?

Making her way across the deserts of North America in search of a place she can see herself reflected in, Carrie muses on her identity through memories, stories, and conversations from other trans* people to uncover what it means to have an embodied experience in the world.

 shows the passing of shots of natural and industrial landscapes, places, and objects, in contrast with the variety of voices of people sharing their experiences of transness. This dialogue gives an atmosphere of reflection and togetherness.

Petra’s work is exploratory in nature, seeking to highlight the beauty in lived experience; utilizing the essay film form and visual anthropology to represent communities in ways grounded in care and mutual respect.

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Nature