MIX 22: November 17-22, 2009
The 2009 MIX Festival serves up queer cinema, art, and performances.
MIX22: The New York Queer Experimental Film Festival pulls into the MIX Factory Tuesday, November 17th, where the train dispatcher will hold it until Sunday, November 22nd. So pull up a seat and pass the time with the latest in vanguard film, video, art and performances!
On Thursday, November 19th, we’re holding a special screening of John Greyson’s 2009 Teddy Award-winner, Fig Trees, an experimental, operatic documentary feature in which an albino squirrel, an amputee busker, and St. Teresa of Avila use Gertrude Stein’s 1934 avant-garde classic Four Saints in Three Acts to tell the stories of historic AIDS activists like Zackie Achmat, who, in 1999, risked his own life in the fight to make AIDS medication available to all South Africans.
After Fig Trees, stay for Luminous Darkness, guest-curated by Daniel McKernan, and featuring a kornukopia of satanic queers and psychedelic wild boys. Watch Luigi & Luca trap themselves in each other’s affection, beer-soaked documentary footage of Gio Black Peter’s international tour with the Black Peter Group in I Got No Strings, and Zackary Drucker’s stripped body plucked of hair in The Inability to be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See. For extreme tastes.
Canadian artist Daniel Barrow makes a return to the festival Friday, November 20th, after a successful and amazing performance of Looking for Love in the Hall of Mirrors at MIX20. In his newest piece, Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry, Barrow combines overhead projection with video, music, and live narration to tell the story of a garbage man with a vision to create an independent phone book chronicling the lives of each person in his city…What he doesn’t yet realize is that a deranged killer is trailing him, murdering each citizen he includes in his book, thus rendering his cataloging efforts obsolete. Barrow is known for his innovative performances, in which he projects, layers and manipulates drawings on mylar transparencies to form what he variously refers to as “graphic performance,” “live illustration,” and “manual animation.” This is not to be missed!
Never Satisfied answers many questions and curiosities that may exist in the viewer’s head: Project B*mbi reveals the similarities between Bambi, The Deer Hunter, and Debbie Does Dallas; Lezzieflick bombards the senses with pulsating sonograms of kisses and fractal vaginal fisting; and Mariah Garnett’s Untitled Peter Berlin Project dons the cruisy aesthetic of the titular gay porn icon and shows the viewer what it’s like when someone gendered female takes on the coded outfits of gay male hyper-sexuality.
Speaking of sex, sexy, and sex-related things, Saturday, November 21st, will be a treat for porn enthusiasts who attend Bigger Than Life: Experimenting with Sex. Join author and scholar Jeffrey Escoffier and his guests, gay erotic pioneer Wakefield Poole (Boys in the Sand, Bijou); Bob Alvarez who, with his partner the late Jack Deveau (1935-1982), made erotic movies heavily influenced by experimental filmmaking; Joe Gage, director of the classic LA Tool and Die; and Owen Hawk, founder of Dark Alley Media and continuing the tradition of experimental portrayals of gay male sexuality. It’s sure to be a night of insight into the early and current visions of gay male sexuality. Escoffier presents a clip show and interviews these overlooked figures from history.
Afterwards, stay for Saturday’s Creepy, Dirty, Girlie show. One heroine in Sarah Stuve’s and PJ Linden’s My Dead Brain will be stuffed and torn apart by society’s bodily expectations. Heather Woodrich’s and Sadie Lune’s Pop provides a feminist riff on some of Andy Warhol’s early films, and 120 Secondi captures a moment of intense desire between an older and younger woman, courtesy of Philrouge. Viewers will be treated to explicit images including various sex acts, fetishes, menstrual blood, nightmarish weddings, pissing in public, excessive make-up, gender bending, food, death, decay, household chores, and pornography. You know, girlie stuff.
Before the doors close, we hope you squeeze in a historic event on Sunday, November 22nd. Cary Cronenwett’s Maggots and Men is a utopian re-visioning of the Kronstadt Uprising of 1921, featuring film history’s first cast of over 100 transgender actors, painting a portrait of formerly pro-Soviet sailors at the Kronstadt naval garrison who rebelled against the perceived failures of the new Bolshevik state
And that’s just a few of the cars on the MIX train. Visit our A Different Take screening and watch the developing visions of queer youth. Stop by Bulldozed! and traverse the burning neighborhoods of yesteryear. Go over the Williamsburg Bridge and across the East River to Union Docs and see Travel Queeries, a feature-length documentary about what it is to be an alternative queer in urban contemporary Europe, where the trains go way damn faster. Come for the screenings, stay for our wild and sexy after-parties–you won’t mind the late night schedule. With MIX 22, don’t just get a single ride, go for the unlimited.
For more info about our line up: http://www.mixnyc.org
Admission (Suggested Donation, Sliding Scale, Give What You Can)
Opening Night — $20
Regular shows — $11
Closing Night and Special Events — $15
Travel Queeries — $7
A Different Take — Free to Youth 23 and Under.
The MIX Factory
125 W. 21st St. (btw. 6th and 7th Ave.)
Subway: 1, C, E, F, V, R, W to 23rd
PATH Train: 23rd Street stop on these lines:
Journal Square – 33rd St
Hoboken – 33rd St
CONTACT:
Devon Gallegos
Festival Assistant, MIX NYC
212-742-8880
hospitality@mixnyc.org
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