NewFest: Experimental Showcase

Filmmakers in person for Q&A!

Looking back as moving forward, this selection of recent works and telling discoveries assembles a queer menagerie of experimentalists and pop icons, like Pet Shop Boys, Lil’ Kim and Kristen (“call me KStew”) Stewart. From flickering Super 8 and scratched 16mm to grainy VHS, HD video, and plasma monitors, the cutting edge never felt so queerly expanded.

Q-Rating: Explicit Sexuality

Hard
Vanessa Roveto | USA | 2013 | 6m
A hilariously deadpan monologue about a chance lesbian encounter with Kristen Stewart backstage at a PhD conference on the subject of the Literature of Transgression in 17th Century Nunneries.

Tableau
Nao Bustamante | USA | 2013 | 18m
In her hilarious new fiction short, Nao Bustamante captures another experimental filmmaker, JT (played by noted queer filmmaker Joshua Thorson) as he struggles with his apocalyptic film and the pesky interruptions by one tween next door neighbor.

Basket
Josef Kraska | USA | 2013 | 5m
Answering a call to arms and stripping out of various stereotypic garbs that signal “blackness” throughout the decades, Narcissister performs a socio-cultural strip tease that must be seen to be believed.

Invisible
Brian Bress | USA | 2012 | 6m
In this debut video for the Pet Shop Boys recent album, Elysium, Los Angeles-based artist Brian Bress infuses an elegiac song with the colorful pop characters and digital abstractions that have characterized his fine art career.

Out of the Strong Come Forth a Sweetness Weakness
Jonesy | USA | 2013 | 12m
Set to the live recording of a sound performance by the collective Unthem commissioned by Outfest Platinum, Out of the Strong… incorporates collage animation elements and live video in a cut-and-paste style that recalls the zine aesthetics of Jonesy's prior involvement with the Queercore movement (Fagbash).

Shaping Up
William E. Jones | USA | 2013 | 2m
Shaping Up loops 30 seconds of found Super 8 footage of a man flexing his biceps and walking a lawnmower in constant repetition.

The Assumption
Navid Sinaki | USA | 2011 | 6m
In this meditative short, filmmaker Navid Sinaki illustrates a man's final conversation with Death with the gorgeous obsolescence of VHS imagery.

Passions of St Aqueduct
Tony Stinkmetal | USA | 1990 | 2m
A lyrical Super 8 portrait shot on the piers of NYC and featuring a pre-Johnsons Antony Hegarty, who was then a member of the Blacklips Performance Cult.

Shelly Winters
Luther Price | USA | 2010 | 10m
Luther Price strips educational celluloid to its most primal resources in this intense rumination on domestic violence in the Boston region, where the filmmaker is from.