In this reinterpretation of the mikveh — a purifying ritual bath performed by Jewish brides about to marry — the filmmaker and his husband’s immersions are disrupted by a government who refuses to recognize their marriage. While the couple is required, again and again, to prove their relationship legally exists, the mikveh they share helps them overcome unforgiving bureaucracies and return to what truly matters.
Letters in the Dark was originally shown as a two-channel video installation, accompanied by photographs at the Benrubi Gallery, New York, in 2016. In 2024, Hall decided to make it available as a single-channel work. Its subject matter is the brief epistolary romance between Franz Kafka and Milena Jesenská.
A troupe of male and female jugglers and musicians perform for a growing crowd in Central Park, New York, led by Hovey Burgess and Judy Finelli. The sun is shining, and the troupe are skilful, playful, and flirtatious.
Strangely Ordinary This Devotion is a visceral exploration of feral domesticity, queer desire, and fantasy in a world under the threat of climate change. Utilizing and exploding archetypes, the film offers a radical approach to collaboration and the conception of family. Dani and Sheilah collect and arrange images and moments that are at once peculiar and banal, precious and disturbing, creating resonance and contrast through experimental modes of storytelling.
Riffing on relations between grief, love, bodies, and embodiment, this short film features two former professional Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus clowns. A Dark Love Story for Clowns weaves together a loosely adapted William Faulkner story with a spiritual ritualistic practice in order to explore the performativity around ethics of care and love.
Paris, as in other metropolitan European cities, is rejuvenated by the influx of border crossing urbanites. While the old guard Europeans accept the arrival of the New Europeans, the tension of the urban mix is recounted in the collective tangled love stories left unfulfilled. Two young LOVEME agents, Natsuo and Hako, sent from Tokyo headquarter, are transported to Paris on a mission.
Brokenhearted, a young lesbian considers doubling her dating possibilities.
This latest work from the ReStack’s pulls the experience of becoming mother (both through fostering and bio) through the lens of personal lives that are always, also, steeped in a world where systemic racism, classism and heteronormativity influence and shape.
Set in the industrial suburbs of Beirut, Majnounak (Crazy of You) explores male sexuality through interviews with three men who are asked to recount very openly the beginning, middle, and end of a sexual relationship they have experienced. The video explores the image they wanted to project of themselves, hence the image of the "male" they identify with. Their stories are alike, starting with seduction and ending after sex.
"I got my first Sony Portapak in 1972 and started keeping a video diary. I sat facing my image on the monitor and talked about what was going on in my life. In 1977 I decided to talk about my current experience with love. I made one half hour tape and watched it play back. Then I made another and watched it play back, and one more... I was done fro now. What follows is the middle half hour and is the tape that I used to start the Love Tapes."
–Wendy Clarke
As of 2024, about 2,500 people have made a love tape.
As the AIDS epidemic took hold in the early 1980s, self-help guru Louise Hay created a space for healing called the Hayride. Drawing hundreds of gay men confronting a deadly and stigmatized disease, Louise promised that they could overcome AIDS through self-love. Some said this early new age wellness movement was unscientific and harmful. Others who were suffering said that Louise healed them. In the face of a deadly pandemic and government neglect, resilience takes unusual forms, and for Louise Hay’s circle, intimate forms of reckoning were transformative.
Rosie Cutler, a middle school lunch lady, and TJ Fortune, a outcast student, have an unusual relationship. Mystically-minded and gender ambiguous, TJ recoils into an abandoned warehouse where he builds a massive sculptural shrine from discarded objects and trash. Through a dream Rosie makes intimate contact with a trans-worldly being who she hopes will bridge the gap between real and imagined to reveal truths about our world.
Strangely Ordinary This Devotion is a visceral exploration of feral domesticity, queer desire, and fantasy in a world under the threat of climate change. Utilizing and exploding archetypes, the film offers a radical approach to collaboration and the conception of family. Dani and Sheilah collect and arrange images and moments that are at once peculiar and banal, precious and disturbing, creating resonance and contrast through experimental modes of storytelling.
Lesser Apes tells the story of a love affair between a primatologist, Farrah, and a female bonobo ape, Meema. Bonobos are the species with which humans share the most DNA, but unlike our species, they are matriarchal, live without conflict, and are unabashedly sexual. A paean to perversion, the film combines animation, live action and song to challenge attitudes about sex, language and our relationship to nature.
An animation developed from the collective experiences of a diverse group of LGBTQIA+ people to create a narrative. The result is a queer valentine having a fever dream.
This latest work from the ReStack’s pulls the experience of becoming mother (both through fostering and bio) through the lens of personal lives that are always, also, steeped in a world where systemic racism, classism and heteronormativity influence and shape.
Gay Tape: Butch and Femme is Cecilia Dougherty's first video work. She was immersed in two things at the time: making artwork, and being a part of the Oakland, California lesbian bar scene. The tape is the child of those two activities. Dougherty asked her friends, Ann and Joanne, and her girlfriend at the time, Rosa, to speak on camera about dating and the emergence of butch-femme relationships, which alluded to not so much a regression to old-time lesbian subculture, as to a quotation of those times, and an appreciation of that kind of lesbian eroticism.
A collection of videos made at Miami-Dade Community College Mitchell Wolfson New World Center as part of Miami Waves Film Festival. The videos are part of Wendy Clarke's ongoing project, Love Tapes.
Land locked souls seek the key to a spiritual doorway that transcends earthly existence.
You, along with them will unlock and enter the "HOUSE OF THE HOLY GHOST", and when inside; be eternally blessed and forever haunted!
The Source is a Hole poses a web of loose connections and liminal associations to sculpt a treatise on transexual mourning. As a series of love letters, stories recount the authors own inception at the 1982 world’s fair, his attempt to remove a lodged tampon, his cravings for bottomless eros, and a barrage of tangential encounters, spanning the everyday, to performance reenactment, to science fiction cinema analysis and drag.
Kuchar makes it to the Isis Oasis resort just in time to catch the marriage vows of his friends Rebecca and Steve. Transposing the myth of Isis in their union, Kuchar tries to make sense of this recreated paradise, this gathering of God’s creatures, and the fates of Rebecca von Hettman and Charlie Sheen—in this humid, steamy, stained story of the transmigration of souls.
The sonic fabric of 2nd Person, [originally] a multi-channel video installation, is formed through an array of women’s voices orchestrated as parallel tracks in a musical composition. The speakers, all women I have intimately known at different points in my life -- my child, my mother, my best friends, students, mentors -- talk with me about aging, growing up, death, motherhood, love and loss.
Lesser Apes tells the story of a love affair between a primatologist, Farrah, and a female bonobo ape, Meema. Bonobos are the species with which humans share the most DNA, but unlike our species, they are matriarchal, live without conflict, and are unabashedly sexual. A paean to perversion, the film combines animation, live action and song to challenge attitudes about sex, language and our relationship to nature.
Anthology 23 Love Tapes is a continuation of Wendy Clarke's "Love Tapes" Project. Young adults recorded in 2023 share their thoughts and experiences about love.
The Story of Milk and Honey is a short experimental video belonging to a larger project, which includes photographs, drawings and text, detailing an un-named individual’s failure to write a love story. Through voiceover narration that weaves together images, letters, and songs, a story of defeat transpires into a journey that explores how we collect and perceive information, understand facts, history, images, and sound and where the individual is to be found in the midst of the material.
Produced with the Fundación Marcelino Botín Grant for Visual Arts Fund.
