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MQFF Sidebar

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I am currently curating a sidebar of innovative moving image work about sex and gender for the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, with support from the VCA and the University of Melbourne.

melbourne-queer-film-festival

I’m looking for short work that responds to Jack/Judith Halberstam’s treatise on queer challenges to the status quo in The Queer Art of Failure. If you have any material, please get in touch!

The sidebar will include a skillshare in cutting edge and experimental film and video techniques, video installation work and an academic panel responding to issues about moving image culture raised in the program.

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Film Fatales Cinematography Workshop

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I helped Amy Browne and Film Fatales Melbourne put on a Cinematography workshop last night, led by Sky Davies.

The workshop was designed to demystify both the technical side of cinematography and its creative implications, pitched at directors and other film creatives. This is a primary vector for discrimination against women in the film and television industry – the presumption that women aren’t comfortable with technology. The onus therefore ends up being on women to ensure that this is not the case, as we are generally expected to prove we are more knowledgeable than our male counter-parts in order to be taken seriously.

It was a hit, the audience fully engrossed in deep technical details of camera technology for 2+ hours, revealing the appetite and need women filmmakers have for technical knowledge.

ACMIX Film Fatales Cinematography Workshop

MyMy (14mins, 2014) completed

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My most recent short film MyMy is now complete!

In a mythic parallel reality, a lonely young man yearns for affinity and connection. In this age of digital avatars, he crafts a version of himself that is far more corporeal – by stitching together parts of himself to become his own cyborg twin. He calls this miraculous being into existence with a techno-magick concoction of symbology and code, and for a while they enjoy a strange and touching get-to-know-you-better of the self. But the cyborg twin has been corrupted by a cyberfeminist virus. This Other self embodies a dangerous idea: that there are parts of ourselves beyond our control.

This lo-fi sci-fi short film is an experimental hybrid of documentary, fiction and performance art. The story plays out in an affective cinematic mode, largely based on a lexicon of imagery and gesture. It features two transgender men, playing a very queer version of their own characters as they perform aspects of themselves onscreen. Throughout the film they are haunted by a chimera, a post-human personification of the desires, fears and possibilities that form who we might be in the future.

The film takes us back to a cyberfeminist future, looking into the black mirror of a possibility beyond identity, where 1990s visions of our cyborg destinies echo like ripples in a pool. Gentle and provocative, the film explores the radical potential to create the self.

Stay tuned for trailer, website and full credits.

Submissions: Aust Shorts for Bangalore Queer Film Festival

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Randy Freaked-Out Psychedelic Homosexy Koalas

There’s been an explosion of queer film in recent years, with festivals and web shows popping up all over the place. Gaymazing!
But as queer films have expanded the niche, have they lost their radical edge? I don’t think so, help me prove it.

I’m currently putting together another program of Australian queer short film, documentary and video art for the Bangalore Queer Film Festival 2012, like this one from 2009. Like last time, I’m open to anything about any aspect of queer life, sex or gender, that exists beyond the edges of mainstream gay culture – funny, wacky, serious, challenging, thought-provoking, moving or just plain weird.

I’ll be including some amazing films from a program I put together a few months ago entitled “Randy Freaked Out Psychedelic Homosexy Koalas” – from slutty musicals, to arty fantasies about hot babes in the lockup referencing the 90s explosion in gay indy filmmaking, to a gentle comedy about cute girls having an awkward per-zine style literary romance, to digital stories by sex workers.

Get in contact asap and let me know if you’ll be submitting your film, submissions close 20th January 2012.

Contact me here.

Please send a link to a digital version if possible, or you can post a DVD to:

Anna Helme, 191a Smith St, Fitzroy, VIC, 3065