The Beginning Parts
Lisa Ganser and Nomy Lamm
Originally commissioned as a response to the question “Where does your magic come from?” from a theatrical presentation of the (as of yet unpublished) novel 515 Clues, this animated love story tracks the beginnings of queer love found and realized.
The Break
Alexis Mitchell
Wayne Koestenbaum examines voice as a site of transgression and inherent queerness in the performance piece that is the subject of this documentary focusing on the relationship between gender and the singing voice. The Break received a special jury citation from the Inside Out Film Festival in Canada.
Candy Royalle
Candy Royalle
This is a live filming of Candy Royalle performing her award winning poem “Memories.” It details the impact of of the occupation on three generations spanning multiple countries.
Criminal Queers
Eric A. Stanley and Chris Vargas
Criminal Queers visualizes a radical trans/queer struggle against the prison industrial complex and toward a world without walls. Remembering that prison breaks are both a theoretical and material practice of freedom, this film imagines what spaces might be opened up if crowbars, wigs, and metal files become tools for transformation. Follow Yoshi, Joy, Susan and Lucy as they fiercely read everything from the Human Rights Campaign and hate crimes legislation to the non-profitization of social movements. Criminal Queers grows our collective liberation by working to abolish the multiple ways our hearts, genders, and desires are confined.
Different Strokes: A Rad History
Ill Nipashi
The little known story of the role of women, people of color and queers in the formation of biker culture. It celebrates joy and liberation while simultaneously showing how the culture created in our communities is often co-opted and not credited.
Disability Justice for Palestine
Sins Invalid and Micah Bazant
Disability Justice for Palestine is a Public Service Announcement created by Sins Invalid during the extended attacks on Gaza in the Summer of 2014. We add our words and faces to a movement for global solidarity with the people of Palestine, articulating the struggle for Palestinian liberation as a disability justice issue.
Dr. Haidar Eid: The Two State Solution
Jordan Flaherty
A conversation with Dr Haidar Eid, Professor of post-colonial and post-modern literature at Al Aqsa University, in Gaza. Dr. Eid is one of the intellectual leaders of the global movement for Palestinian liberation.
Frameline: Say No to Bibi Bux!
John Greyson
A video letter to Frameline, protesting their cuddly relationship with the Israeli consulate. First shown projected on the Castro Theater at a demonstration against Frameline opening in 2014.
From Oakland to Palestine
Pablo Serrano
The Oakland Palestine Solidarity Mural spans 157 feet and reaches 22 feet high. Using the occupation of Palestine as a lens, the mural addresses social and political issues including interlinked histories of colonization, environmental exploitation and international solidarity.
Fuck My Life, the short
Xandra Ibarra and Rob Fatal
Named after Ibarra’s full-length performance work, FML, the short, reveals La Chica Boom’s “fucked life” and her transformation into a reviled creature.
Gaza Island
John Greyson
The Freedom Flotilla 2, with 12+ boats carrying humanitarian aid and 1000+ peace activists, is sailing to Gaza in late June. Alice Walker, who’s sailing with us, calls this the Freedom Ride of our generation. We want to help open this Palestinian port and end the illegal Israeli blockade, which has caused so much suffering. Meanwhile, the global BDS (Boycott Divestment Sanctions) movement is calling on Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Laurie Anderson and Kiri Te Kanawa to cancel their 2011 Israel concerts and get on the boat!
Hey Elton
John Greyson
Palestinian civil society has called on Elton John to respect their boycott call and cancel his June 17th concert in Tel Aviv. If he does so, he’ll be joining Santana and Gil-Scott Heron, who recently cancelled their spring concerts in Israel. This video suggests six reasons why Elton should join the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement.
High Hopes
Guy Davidi and Angela Godfrey-Goldstein
In 1997-1998, Bedouin refugees under Israeli Occupation were forcibly displaced by Israel to a garbage dump, during the Oslo Peace Process period, with “high hopes” for peace. Currently, a plan is progressing to forcibly displace Bedouin refugees to a site accommodating 12,500 Bedouin, for settlement expansion; experts define this as a war crime and cultural genocide.
Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger
Sam Feder
For decades, performance artist and writer, Kate Bornstein has been exploding binaries and deconstructing gender—and her own identity. Trans-dyke. Reluctant polyamorist. Sadomasochist. Recovering Scientologist. Pioneering gender outlaw. This recently released film joins her on her latest tour, capturing rollicking public performances and painful personal revelations as it bears witness to Kate as a trailblazing artist-theorist-activist who inhabits a space between male and female with wit, style and astonishing candor.
La Corrida
Xandra Ibarra
La Corrida is a working/experimental clip of a site-specific endurance run/performance on the El Paso/Juarez border. Due to the violence caused by drug cartels, Juarez is one of the world’s most violent cities. Just across the Rio Grade is El Paso, Texas, one of the safest cities in the US. Many neighborhoods on the Juarez border have been abandoned and many have run across the border to find safety. Sites featured in video include: Franklin Mountains, Walls outside of Fort Bliss, the dry river bed of the Rio Grande where the U.S. border fence with Mexico ends.
Major!
(Sneak Preview)
Annaliese Ophelian | StormMiguel Florez, producer
Get a first look at this brand new documentary in progress about transgender elder and pioneering civil rights activist Miss Major Griffin-Gracy. A formerly incarcerated Black transgender elder and activist who has been fighting for the rights of trans women of color for over 40 years, Miss Major is a veteran of the Stonewall Rebellion and a survivor of Attica State Prison, a former sex worker, an elder, and a community leader and human rights activist. She is simply “Mama” to many in her community. The filmmakers will be on hand to premiere excerpts from their work in progress.
One Night
Laura Durkay
In a New York City that looks just like ours, but is a dictatorship, a young woman named Lil (Rasha Zamamiri) has a chance encounter with a member of an underground resistance movement (Caitlin Mehner) that changes her life forever.
Once Upon a Time
Happy/L.A. Hyder
Long-time photographer Hyder’s first foray into filmmaking wraps her personal story around a history of the contemporary women’s movement. An experimental narrative, Once… will have all generations nodding in agreement and cheering at the end.
The Path to Coming Out: Queer Lebanese Speak Up
Maher Sabry
Maher Sabry interviews three Lebanese people in the San Francisco/Bay Area. The self-identified trans man (Amir), butch dyke (Nayla) and pansexual man (Bassam) speak candidly about coming out to family and friends.
The Passionate Pursuits of Angela Bowen
Jennifer Abod
The Passionate Pursuits of Angela Bowen is the story about a young black girl who came of age during the Jim Crow era in the 1940s and 50s in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and how her early home life and experiences influenced her passions, mission and strategies for survival over six decades.
In the film, Angela Bowen, a passionate dancer, choreographer, teacher, activist, writer, and professor confronts racism, sexism, and homophobia, transforming her own life, and the lives of those around her. The through-line in Passionate Pursuits reveals how Bowen managed to be her authentic self wherever and whenever she stood–from the stages of the La Scala Opera House to the university classroom.
Passionate Pursuits is important to anyone who wants to know more about the experiences and complexities of black women’s lives, the history of Black Dance, and the emergence of Black Feminism and its importance in white women’s lives.
Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back
Dean Spade
Follow Queers Against Israeli Apartheid’s campaign to get the City of Seattle’s LGBT Commission to cancel a meeting about LGBT rights in Israel. The meeting, which was funded by the Israeli Consulate, was part of a propaganda tour for Israel. There was a massive backlash against the organizers of the campaign in the mainstream LGBT community. The film focuses on Israel’s injustices and the queer fight against pinkwashing, while raising important questions about the LGBT community’s role in and connection to other liberation movements.
Reinas de Los Angeles
Byron Jose
Reinas de Los Angeles narrates the oral hystories of trans immigrant women and drag queen performers who bring to life the stages of Latino gay bars in Los Angeles.
Shit Manarchists Say
Lacey Johnson and Rebecca Ruiz Sunwoo
This is a short movie that uses the “shit people say” genre that was an internet
trend in 2011. This movie features two ladies wearing bandanas impersonating patriarchal anarchists (manarchists), and saying things that have been told to us by said manarchists, shedding light on the culpability of the manarchist’s participation in the structural oppression that plays out within US anarchist culture.
Sin Visa
Ana Simões 
Marco, a young undocumented immigrant in California, faces physical, verbal, emotional, economic and sexual abuse by mostly other Latinos. His unlikely friendship with a college counselor who has a totally opposite background (race, age, education level, socioeconomic status and sexual orientation) is the only ray of hope in Marco’s life. After the passing of his mother, Marco finds a new family formed of two Arab-American gay men.
Sins Invalid: An Unshamed Claim to Beauty
Patty Berne
Conceived and led by disabled people of color, Sins Invalid develops and presents cutting-edge work where common paradigms of “normal” and “sexy” are challenged, offering instead a vision of beauty and sexuality inclusive of all individuals and communities. See a film of this groundbreaking performance.
Things Are Different Now (now captioned!)
Ryan Conrad
By collaging archival footage from ACT UP’s political funerals with portrait images of twenty of the filmmaker’s peers, TADN tries to imagine what it would feel like to lose all of them in a few years time to AIDS. What does loss on that scale feel like?
Third World Resistance and Black Lives Matter
East Bay videographers team
Footage from Bay Area Ad Hoc Video Teams of actions connecting Palestine, Haiti, queer and disabled liberation struggles to the movement to stop killings of Black people and the militarization of the police.
We Blocked the Boat
Pablo Serrano | ASAP Production, producer
In August 2014 over a thousand people participated in the longest blockade of an Israeli ship in history. The ZIM ship was turned away from the SSA terminal in the Port of Oakland.
Outside The Frame 