Queer/Art/Film
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“Queer/Art/Film has fast become one of the city’s most adventurous repertory programs. The overall picture that emerges…is of a queer cinema that is barely, if at all, concerned with the problems of representation and the burdens of identity politics, and that has never been shy to speak its name.” — Dennis Lim, New York Times
“Essential” – The New Yorker
Since its inception in 2009, the Queer/Art/Film series has been one of the most exciting, innovative monthly film nights in NYC. Each month, filmmakers Ira Sachs and Adam Baran invite your favorite queer artists from across the creative spectrum to present a title from the wide world of film that’s influenced them, and to lead a discussion after the screening. For the new year-round Los Angeles edition of the residency, local Q/A/F curator Lucas Hildebrand brings the fun, and welcomes a diverse slate of West Coast guest programmers. Past Cinefamily Q/A/F guest have included John Cameron Mitchell (filmmaker of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Shortbus and Rabbit Hole), Lizzie Borden (filmmaker of Born In Flames) and Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn!
QUEER/ART/FILM: Let Me Die A Woman (presented by Zackary Drucker!)
Last year’s visiting Queer/Art/Film residency — in which queer artists from across the creative spectrum present a title from the wide world of film that’s inspired them — was so much fun that we’re bringing it back from NYC to the Cinefamily full-time, with the help of new Q/A/F curator Lucas Hildebrand! For the 2013 re-launch, the evening’s guest programmer is the extraordinary young performance/video artist Zackary Drucker. Conceiving, discovering, and manifesting herself as “a woman in the wrong world,” Drucker’s work is rooted in cultivating and investigating underrecognized aspects of transgender history. Her perfectly chosen screening: sexploitation filmmaker Doris Wishman’s infamous foray into documentary, Let Me Die A Woman. As it explores the lives of ‘70s transsexuals, the film astoundingly combines comically awkward group therapy scenes, staged softcore sex, graphic surgery footage of an actual vaginoplasty, and an impossibly weird simulated self-castration (what better way to mark Father’s Day?) At once salacious and a rare empathetic representation of transgender experience, Let Me Die A Woman stands as both an outrageous cult classic and a complicated, yet vital text.
Dir. Doris Wishman, 1977, 35mm, 79 min.
Watch the trailer for “Let Me Die A Woman”!
