Summer/Autumn 2023

Hello!  It’s been a while since I updated this site, and the world has descended into lower layers of nightmare than ever.  My little movies have been out there doing their work in the world, it’s what I am using to voice my dissent and hope.

In July I traveled to the UK to attend FilmPride in Brighton. We marched in the Brighton Pride Parade through a storm, but all ended well in Preston Park.  Deborah Espect and team created a theater where the films were screened that was impressively cozy retro and made for a great viewing experience for everyone (open captions – yay!) The weekend before I was part of a screening and q/a at The Ledward Center where I ran into my friend and idol Kate Jessop.  Beers and film talk ensued!

While in Glasgow I watched Kokomo City at the Glasgow Film Theater.  What an important and powerful film!   In early August my short film Drew Adair was included in Philadelphia’s  The Film Collective Festival.  This short film is the start of a project that I hope will become a longer documentary film.

Most recently, “Rural Butch Femme Rap” was shown at the Appalachian Queer Film Festival, and was nominated for Best Short Film, which deservedly was won by the hilarious “29 Hot Dogs” starring the hunky Brandon English.  It was really important to me to get my work seen by people who don’t have easy access to queer in-person special events. I was humbled to see that the festival had security around the building and offered to escort attendees to their cars if they wished.

Coming up in November will be my northern-most screening ever; at the Baltic Circle Theater Festival. This event happens in Helsinki, Finland on 17th of November 2023.  The curator Remi Vesala has selected my movies “When A Butch Dyke Dies” and “My Crazy Boxers.”

Let’s Celebrate DIY Movies at the Cinema Museum!

Hello Friends! Please join me at London’s Cinema Museum on 2 March 2023 for an amazing reunion of filmmakers and festival organizers. Look how far we’ve come! Since the first Wotever DIY Film Festival (my first one was 2013) so many brilliant festivals began, many of them connected somehow to the Wotever DIY Film Festival. My fondest wish is that we can all have some time together, and no one will have to be running a festival, we will all just be hanging out.

Here are the details:

2 March 2023  18:00 – 2200  (plenty of time to socialize!)
Cinema Museum The Master’s House, 2 Dugard Way (off Renfrew Road), London SE11 4TH

Photos with Kyla Harris, Tara Brown, Theresa Heath, Charlie Little and Helen Wright at BFI Southwark at the “Busting The Bias Opening Night: Is There Anybody Out There? An Illustrated Talk + ECLECTIC: Shorts Programme, an evening celebrating disability visibility and filmmaking. 3 March 2023. A group photo with 4 people, indoors at an event smiling a the camera, from left to right: Theresa Heath, Tara Brown, Charlie Little and Helen Wright.

Summer 2022

Hello!  It’s been quite the year so far.  My little movies seem so inadequate to stand against all the horrors, but I will continue to fight with whatever i’ve got.  So …

Upcoming Screenings: 

FilmPride: August 6-7, 2022, Brighton & Hove, UK. Mickey or Minnie During the Brighton & Hove Pride weekend on 6th and 7th August, the FilmPride festival will take place in Preston Park, the beating heart of every year’s event.  My movie will screen in the We Are Fabuloso program.

Screenings since the spring:

Splice: June 25-26, 2022, Brooklyn, NY, USA.  Mickey or Minnie won an Honorable Mention during the festival, held at the beautiful and historic Film Noir Cinema in Greenpoint.

QFlix: Philadelphia, PA, USA:  Due to government ineptness, QFlix’s non-profit status expired, and so they were not able to produce the festival this year.  They had selected Mickey or Minnie to screen there, in my local film festival, so i am sad about that.

Translations: Seattle Transgender Film Festival, Seattle, WA, USA

 

Welcome 2022 or whatever

Hello Fans!
Well, my new year started with a a limp literally and stay-at-home/curfew.  I’m working on a new movie (rather re-working an old one) and have big plans for more.  I just need the time and attention.  LOL

Did you know I have a show on Philadelphia Community Access Television?   I try to show a mix of my work and international queer shorts.  Here is a link to watch a sneak preview of February’s show.  I’m happy to say there will be more puppetry in 2022!  I see my video work and community access show as a way of defying what is usually offered to viewers through mainstream streaming services.  I also love that is actually broadcast like I watched growing up.

Watch live TV here!

November – December 2021 screnings

I’m so proud to have been selected for the Third Edition of the Burnt Video Art and Experimental Film Festival.  My work was included in Burnt 3.4, which shows in November 2021.

From Burnt Video Art and Experimental Film Festival 3.4 “Crown Branches” program:
Rites and othering

To be on the wrong side of the lens. On the margins of a memory, a story, a social construct. To explore through intimate and symbolic portraits, one’s foundational story, sexuality, trauma and healing.

Six short films are part of the latest program for Burnt Fest’s third edition. Films that revolve around parental relationships, transgenerational fears, identity and impulses and try to make sense, through gestures of peeling, of smoothing, of confrontation of characters, their journey of different realizations.

Remembering only the photographs in their materiality while stripping them from their surroundings, the photographs become more vivid than the lived memories.

“To find the day of 21st” by Kieko Ikehata, explores the memory taken over by images, by photographs that erase what isn’t in them and limit one’s past to bits and pieces of what remains seen. It examines how recorded images can become more vivid than our original memory, an impure historical evidence.

The time when a photograph is taken, a photograph is seen and then the time when it’s looked at again.

How much can one rely on the photographs? And how does one make sure a day is remembered when it does not have a signifier? Ikehata’s film is a mixture of archives and landscapes but also the narrator’s memories and those of their mother. A blend of past and present where mother/daughter realities, memories and their physical existence in a space in different times, intertwine.

The overlap in Masha Vlasova’s “Her Type”, is that between the filmmaker and their father. By the manipulation of a photograph through a masculinizing application, Masha now resembles her dad. The space between the mother’s gaze and the photograph on the phone becomes that of a romantic recollection, a longing for a deceased lover. A space where intimate desires surface and tension between the subject and the camera is palpable.

Where the object of desire is digitally fabricated in “Her type”, the object of fear is genetically transmitted in Nat Portnoy’s “42 Dni/ 42 Days”. Portoy’s film is that of confrontation of the self, not only with the disease but also with her surroundings. It is a body on the margins trying to accept its fate and desires, wondering if they are one’s own. How can one feel at home in the world when they feel failed by their body and lineage and through their visual diary, try to regain control?

Such is also the case of “Letter to my mother” by Amina Maher. A work of art consisted of many layers being stripped and shaved and peeled, where the protagonist tries to regain control over their narrative and trauma.

Amina Maher’s relationship with her mother had already been captured on film by Abbas Kiarostami in Ten. In one of the scenes, Amina as a child expresses that “we must grow up before we belong to ourselves”. When sexual abuse is denounced in “Letter to my mother”, those words hold the grown ups accountable of their failure to protect as well as their denial in order to preserve the spectacle of normalcy.

In “1975 of my mother and me” by Jun-Yuan Hong, this spectacle of marital bliss under patriarchal domination is questioned by the filmmaker who tries to merge memories and fictional narrative in order to make sense of, or question and critique a past. The film unfolds as vignettes of a woman’s life, through which we feel the impotence and inability to change one’s fate as if driven by external forces in addition to traditions and customs .

A fate manipulated by some external hand, such as in #DaughterFail by Krissy Mahan in which the small characters are gliding through the screen on a piece of paper navigating a preconceived path that situates them in a bigger narrative.

November 2021
c.partamian

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Also November 2021:
Gilbert Baker Film Festival 24 November – 12 December 2021

2021 Gilbert Baker Film Festival offers specially curated LGBTQ+ content including mixed short film programs, feature-length film screenings, moderated live watch parties, Q&As and plenty of opportunities for audience engagement.

Each week of live programming will accommodate for different global regions/time zones to extend the reach and accessibility of this festival as per the vision of the festival to connect people and reach marginalized, isolated, rural LGBTQIIA+, Sapphic, Achillean, or Diamoric communities worldwide. 

Update on autumn and screenings through the end of the year.

Hello! It’s been a minute since I’ve updated this, and there is so much to say!

We won an award!  YaliniDream’s “I Am/YaliniDream” won an Honorable Mention for International Short Film at the Toronto Tamil International Film Festival.

Here is a photo me, out to brunch with my entourage after the QFlix Philly local film showcase.

“My Aunt Mame” was included in a “Best of Bechdel” film showcase at the She Burns Bright Festival in Akron, Ohio and also was shown at a Queers In Shorts event in Cambridge, UK.  I am so proud of that little movie.  I think it successfully shows the reality of queer/eldercare – being alone as an elder queer/being the child who does the eldercare/ worry from parents that queer children will have hard lives.

Upcoming screenings!

10 November 2021 showing at Everyman Leeds, Albion Street  “Have You Ever Thought Why,” my 2021 meditation on how my gender is perceived differently as i age, was selected to be shown at the prestigious Leeds International Film Festival. It was an honor to be selected and a firm reminder that I do need to be more organized, because i almost didn’t get it together in time.

20 November 2021 #DaughterFail will be shown in Berlin! WIPE Amateur Film Festival, to be held at FLUTGRABEN e. V., am Flutgraben 3, Berlin, Germany.

November 15-29, 2021  “Have You Ever Thought Why” is included in the Burnt Video Art and Experimental Film Festival, based in Montreal, Canada. https://burntfest.com/3-4/https://burntfest.com/3-4/

“My Aunt Mame” and “My Crazy Boxers” will be showing in the Gilbert Baker Film Festival happening online here from November 24th – Sunday December 12th, 2021.  I’m very pleased that my movies were included, and i hope the festival is a huge success. Please buy tickets and watch!

 

 

So fun, right!

Screenings and programs – August/September


It’s with happiness and humility that I can share that these festivals have selected my films:

FilmPride, available online August 16 – 31, 2021, will be the World Premiere of my new movie Have You Ever Thought Why.  It is included in the SELF program.

Prism 34 / AGLIFF :  has selected Carol for the “Avant Garde” program, which will be available online from August. 26 – Sept. 6, 2021. The Avant Garde film program description reads;  “Is it a film? Is it an art piece? Is that a penis? You never know what you find in this assortment of inventive filmmaking not bound by narrative.”

Les Mains Gauches happens the 9th to the 12th of Septembre 2021 in Marseille, France. They have selected My Crazy Boxers.

The Toronto International Tamil Film Festival will show I Dream / YaliniDream at their event happening September 11-12, 2021 in Toronto.

Women Over 50 Film Festival will show #DaughterFail in their online festival happening 25-26 September, 2021.

Burnt Art Video and Experimental Film Fest will include #DaughterFail in their festival in Autumn, 2021.

 

 

FilmPride – Brighton, UK

My new movie “Have You Ever Thought Why” will be making it’s world premiere at the Brighton & Hove Pride’s official LGBTQ+ film festival, FilmPride now in our third year.

2nd – 31st August 2021– online & on TV:  use this link to sign up  to view the programs.

I’m screening with:

IS IT ME: Dir: Christopher McGill – 9:45, UK
Les Gorges (Canyons): Dir: Elsa Thomas – 18:54, France
Never Tell Anyone About This: Dir: Kate Sedlyarova – 38:20, Russian Federation
MOTTA: Dir: Nish Gera – 15:30, UK
Eve: Dir: Joe Solomon – 13:04, UK
BEAT 97: Dir: Washington Calegari – 11:51, Brazil
PARTNER – Big Gay Hands: Dir: Lesley Marshall – 3:22, Canada
The Act: Dir: Thomas Hescott – 17:58, US
Modern Queer Heroes: Dir: Kate Jessop – 5:00, UK
Pure: Dir: Natalie Jasmine Harris – 12:20, US
Trans Happiness is Real: Dir: Quinton Baker – 8:05, UK
Venus: Dir: Faye Carr-Wilson – 5:40, UK
Build Black Futures: Dir: OnRaé LaTeal Watkins – 1:20, US
From A to Q: Dir: Emmalie El Fadli – 18:52, UK
Récit de Soit (Oneself Story): Dir: Géraldine Charpentier – 4:53, Belgium
Factory Talk: Dir: Lucie Rachel, Chrissie Hyde – 4:31, UK
Teddy: Dir: Milda Baginskaite – 12:30, UK
Flamenco Queer: Dir: Ana González, Frederick Bernas – 22:46, Spain
Photographing Bisexuality: Dir: Meryem Ait Aghnia – 5:07, Morocco
Lonesome – a Malaysian LGBTQ+ Voicemail Documentary: Dir: Justice Khor – 17:00, Malaysia
Would you Realise that I’m a Survivor?: Dir: Carlos Ledesma – 2:46, Argentina
Masisi Wouj: Dirs: Zé Kielwagen, M. Serafim, S. Simeon – 22:00, Haiti
Roadkill: Dir: Aliza Brugger – 15:00, US
Sebastienne: Dir: José Alberto Andrés Lacasta – 13:29, Spain
No Historical Precedent: Dir: Mae Hoffman – 9:31, US
Lessons: Dir: Sam Seccombe – 15:14, UK
#TMI (webseries): Dir: Ashlei Shyne – 23:23, US
Spinach and Eggs: Dir: Lee Campbell – 5:38, UK
Have You Ever Thought Why?: Dir: Krissy Mahan – 1:59, US

aGLIFF / Prism Film Festival

Isn’t it hilarious that my parody of Carol will be screening at the prestigious aGLIFF / Prism Film Festival this year?!  Did you know that Austin is where it all started — I entered the My Gay Movie competition in 2004 and won the prize for the weirdest movie.  And it’s only gotten weirder since then.  Here’s the lineup:

A BRONX STORY BELL SOTO
Carol Krissy Mahan
COVID SUMMER Todd Verow
Fluid Bound Rob Fatal
Hajun Blooms Ji Yoon Kim
ISHTAR Mia Georgis
Lilies Joni Renee Whitworth
Pote de baise (Fuck Buddy) Daniel Sterlin-Altman
Sanctity of Love, The Alí Meyer
Show For Ghosts James Medley, Em Haverty

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