Directing
Just over the border in Mexico is an area peppered with maquiladoras: massive sweatshops often owned by the world's largest multinational corporations. Carmen and Lourdes work at maquiladoras in Tijuana, and it is there that they try to balance the struggle for survival with their own radicalization in this documentary.
Documentary look at the 1996-97 effort of the dancers and support staff at a San Francisco peep show, The Lusty Lady, to unionize. Angered by arbitrary and race-based wage policies, customers' surreptitious video cameras, and no paid sick days or holidays, the dancers get help from the Service Employees International local and enter protracted bargaining with the union-busting law firm that management hires. We see the women work, sort out their demands, and go through the difficulties of bargaining. The narrator is Julia Query, a dancer and stand-up comedian who is reluctant to tell her mother, a physician who works with prostitutes, that she strips.
Through both interviews and dramatic reenactments, this documentary chronicles the life of Paulina Cruz Suárez.In the 1950's, when Paulina was a child in a rural Mexican village, her parents traded her away for land rights. The villagers ostracized her and the town boss raped her, keeping her as his unwilling mistress throughout much of her adolescence. At 15, she took control of her destiny and escaped to Mexico City to begin a new life. Now middle-aged, Paulina returns to her village to confront her family about what happened and encounters a web of intrigue and denial. PAULINA interweaves documentary and fiction styles to explore the characters' radically different perspectives and memories, and those of this vital, resilient woman.
A feature-length documentary film-in-progress chronicling the birth and development of LGBTQ comics through the eyes of several of its pioneers. The film was inspired by the Lambda award-winning book of the same name, and dives deeper into the personal stories at the heart of this unique underground artistic scene. Featuring Alison Bechdel (Fun Home), the recently departed Howard Cruse (Stuck Rubber Baby, Gay Comix), and others, this film aims to show how DIY queer cartoonists have represented, poked fun at, and celebrated LGBTQ lives and experiences in challenging, humorous, and profound ways.
How does a woman’s body move? skin•es•the•si•a scrambles the cultural codes of female movement by juxtaposing images from the work of performance artist Hannah Sim with images of Sim working as a nude dancer in a peep show. It explores the rapport between one woman’s body and two performance environments. How are women perceived and typed through our own physical movements? What might a response of power to these codes and norms look like? What do we discover by embracing our otherness, by transforming it into a means of confronting the world?
