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Experimental & Avant-garde Films

A 1994 Video Book
Beverly Singer
1994, 6 min., Color, US
In this video diary, Beverly Singer, a documentarian and member of the Santa Clara Tewa Pueblo, has created an introspective examination of her life and memories. She muses aloud about history, person...

79 Spring Times of Ho Chi Minh
Santiago Alvarez
Producer: ICAIC
1969, 25 min., Color, Cuba
This impressionist biography on the leader of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam skillfully interweaves still photos, newsreel footage, and Ho Chi Minh's poetry. Depicting a life that spanned three re...

aletheia
Tran T. Kim-Trang
1992, 16 min., Color, US
An introduction to Kim-Trang's video series on metaphorical and physical blindness, ALETHEIA explores the interconnected issues of cosmetic surgical alteration of the eyelids, technology, language, ra...

alexia
Tran T. Kim-Trang
2002, 10 min., Color, US
Alexia is an experimental video about word blindness and metaphor. Word-blindness is a condition that usually afflicts people who have suffered a stroke, causing them to lose the visual recognition of...

An Intro to Cultural Skit-zo-frenia
Jamika Ajalon
1993, 10 min., Color, US
An experimental documentary exploring the lives, views of people who don't fit or who live outside the definitions regulating race ("i.e. black enough"), gender, or sexuality....

Asian Boys
Angel Velasco Shaw
1994, 19 min., Color, US
This documentary was produced in collaboration with performance artist Nicky Paraiso for his critically acclaimed multi-media performance at P.S. 122. Eleven different interviews with "Asian Boys" are...

Black & White
Edgar Garcia Chavez
Producer: Edgar Garcia Chavez
2020, 5 min., Color, US
This experimental film dissects the Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary’s definitions of the words "Black" and "White" – to prove how, historically, the meanings of both words have been ingrained with ver...

Black Body
Thomas Allen Harris
1992, 7 min., Color, US
Thomas Allen Harris uses text, special effects, and a single bound male nude to emphasize the humanity underlying the multiple definitions of black identity and subjectivity. The audience may be asked...

Black Women, Sexual Politics and the Revolution
Black Planet Productions
Producer: Black Planet Productions
1992, 29 min., Color, US
Black women speak candidly on issues of sex, class and gender roles. The video examines how African American women deal with issues of poverty, abortion, battering and lack of health care, and address...

The Blindness Series
Tran T. Kim-Trang
US
Tran T. Kim-Trang's Blindness Series consists of eight experimental videos which consider blindness as metaphor. Titles include: EPILOGUE, ALETHEIA, OPERCULUM, KORE, OCULARIS, EKLEIPSIS, AMAUROSIS, an...

Demarcations
Kym Ragusa
Producer: Third World Newsreel Workshop
1992, 5 min., Color, US
DEMARCATIONS uses the female body as a landscape to explore memories of a rape. Ragusa focuses on ways in which identity and exoticism are played out on the level of the body....

Detour: Or How I Spent My Weekend
Deron Twohatchet
1995, 28 min., Color, US
Two mismatched drifters, Jim and James, are on a voyage discovering the contours of homo/hetero, red/white, personal/political, textual/metatextual in an experimental narrative feast. In a critique of...

Doing What It Takes: Black Folks Getting and Staying Healthy
Donna Golden
Producer: Black Planet Productions
1994, 23 min., Color, US
Black communities are disproportionately affected by cancer, heart disease, low birth weight and infant mortality rates. Facing political, economic and racial barriers to good health, this video docum...

Double Exposure
Kit-Yin Snyder
2003, 26 min., Color
A poetically inspired documentary, exploring the conflicts and contradictions of the "cultural statelessness" experienced by a first generation Chinese-American immigrant. It uses a series of first-pe...

ekleipsis
Tran T. Kim-Trang
1998, 23 min., Color, US
"I came across a New York Times article about a group of hysterically blind Cambodian women in Long Beach, California, the largest group of such people known in the world. Hysterical blindness is sigh...

Ent-homo-philia
Hima B.
2003, 10 min., Color, US
With traces of Kafka, this experimental short locates us in an altered state of reality as the set for an unsuspecting beetle's participation in her mate's metamorphosis. Influenced by Kafka's "The M...

Epilogue: The Palpable Invisibility of Life
Tran T. Kim-Trang
2006, Color, US
How can we make visible the invisible? How can we "see" our lost loved ones? In EPILOGUE, Vietnamese-American filmmaker Tran T. Kim Trang looks for answers to these questions in the audio recordings ...

Ezekiel's Dream
Narcel G. Reedus
1994, 15 min., BW, US
EZEKIEL'S DREAM starring Steve Coulter is a visual poem describing the last thoughts of a black man perparing for the fight of his life. This film has garnered numerous awards and has screened in Berl...

Finding Christa
Camille Billops & James Hatch
1991, 55 min., Color, US
This documentary presents a moving yet unsentimental view of motherhood and adoption. It explores the feelings surrounding the reunion of a young woman with her natural mother 20 years after being giv...

History Doesn’t Have to Repeat Itself
Stéphane Gérard
2014, 85 min., Color, France/US
Forty-three years after the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, filmmaker Stéphane Gérard travels to New York City in an attempt to find the activist community that was born out of this historical moment and to ...

Ideal Narration
Yau Ching
1993, 3 min., Color
A music video of the Internationale as a meditation on contemporary Chinese history, this short combines archival imagery and text, mapping out a space between idealism and propaganda....

The Imagined, the Longed-for, the Conquered and the Sublime
Roddy Bogawa
1994, 8 min., Color, US
The video is a collection of 'pure images' of landscape, redeeming these images for what they are. Taken, but unaltered, in the order they appear, from the films Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger ...

Imagining Place
Anita Chang
1999, 35 min., Color, US
For one year, with a curious eye and a curious mind, the filmmaker asks herself and a cross section of individuals, "What does belonging feel like in America?" Amidst increasing social, technological...

In Whose Name?
Nandini Sikand
2004, 11 min., Color
In Whose Name? is a filmic essay which explores the co-opting of icons by political agendas. This experimental short is told through personal narrative, Super 8mm home movies, Bollywood film clips an...

Indian Having Coffee With Kerouac, Ginsberg and Hemingway
James Luna
1994, 23 min., Color, US
Visual and performance artist James Luna takes these famous American writers and parallels their spiritual, political and emotional state to the American Indian community. The icons are played by Indi...

Is There Anything Specific You Want Me to Tell You About?
Yau Ching
1991, 12 min., Color
Using a combination of dramatized footage, tourist video, old propaganda films and archival material to explore the nature of exile and the ambivalent longing for "home" which it produces....

Jagadakeer: Between the Near and East
Tina M. Bastajian
2001, 19 min., Color, US
Jagadakeer is an Armenian word meaning fate, or literally, what is written on one's forehead. Memory, nostalgia, displacement, absence and reconnection are explored using the Armenian genocide as a po...

The KKK Boutique Ain't Just Rednecks (76 minutes)
Camille Billops & James Hatch
1994, 76 min., Color, US
Write Billops and Hatch: "Even as late as a hundred years ago, discrimination on the basis of race was considered a natural and even desirable trait for humans to possess. We Americans have tried to i...

The KKK Boutique ain't Just Rednecks: A Docu/Fantasy about Everybody's Racism
Camille Billops & James Hatch
1994, 60 min., Color, US
Write Billops and Hatch: "Even as late as a hundred years ago, discrimination on the basis of race was considered a natural and even desirable trait for humans to possess. We Americans have tried to i...

kore
Tran T. Kim-Trang
1994, 17 min., Color, US
The third installment in the series opens with two women who are blindfolded and making love. This visually lush and erotic exploration of blindness investigates questions of desire and power, empowe...

Living in Half Tones
Me-K Ahn
1994, 9 min., Color
A metaphorical reconstruction of the artist's developing identity as an adopted Korean girl in America who returns to Korea for the first time "to search for bits and pieces of my past." A visually po...

Locations of the M/othership: Black Women as Fugitive Archetype of Resistance
Jamika Ajalon
2009, 20 min., Color/BW, UK/US
A live audio/visual installation using images of subversive and legendary Black women and excerpts from sci-fi films and TV series. Ajalon explores the intersection of Black women’s representations an...

Memories of a Forgotten War
Camilla Benolirao Griggers/Sari Lluch Dalena
Producer: Kawayan Films
2002, 57 min., Color, US/The Philippines
In the decade following the Spanish-American War, more Filipinos were killed by US troops than by the Spanish during the 300 years of colonial rule. More than 1 million Filipinos died between 1899 an...

Memory Tracks
Jamika Ajalon
1996, 12 min., UK
A woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown follows the afroed spirit of a revolutionary past through London's streets: Brixton and Portobello. I used the camera as the means for reflexive analysis of...

Mommy, What's Wrong?
Anita Chang
1997, 14 min., Color
Along with optically-printed home movie and hand-processed Super-8 film footage, the filmmaker incorporates an interview with her mother about immigration, motherhood and spirituality, in search of st...

Monique
Yvonne Welbon
1990, 3 min., BW, US
Using a childhood experience of racial bigotry at school, this film looks at the ways in which racism is ingrained in American society, even in the play of children. MONIQUE is a compelling exploratio...

Mother Tongue
Patrice Mallard
Producer: Third World Newsreel Workshop
1994, 7 min., BW, US
Inspired by the experience of her great-grandparents, Mallard uses the history of slavery and the nature of language to examine the profound effects of colonization on the psyche of a people....

Nailed
Angel Velasco Shaw
1992, 50 min., Color
A Filipina's exploration of the Catholic Church and 400 years of colonialism in the Pacific region is woven in a montage of images, sounds, stories and performances. Inspired by Lucy Reyes, a woman wh...

The Nation Erupts
Black Planet Productions
Producer: Deep Dish TV, Black Planet Productions
1992, 60 min., Color, US
Focusing on nationwide responses in the wake of the Rodney King verdict. Grassroots producers across the country reflect on the media coverage of the resulting L.A. uprising and its aftermath. Communi...

NCZ Goes to War
Black Planet Productions
Producer: Black Planet Productions
1992, 30 min., Color, US
An examination of the Persian Gulf anti-war movement and its scant coverage in the mainstream media. NCZ went out in the streets and documented the response from activists, demonstrators, journalists ...

Our House: Lesbians and Gays in the Hood
Black Planet Productions
Producer: Black Planet Productions
1993, 28 min., Color, US
Up front and in your face interviews with Black gays and lesbians provide an uncompromising look at homophobia, racism, alienation and empowerment for queer African Americans. This riveting documentar...

Ọya: Something Happened On The Way To West Africa!
Seyi Adebanjo
2015, 30 min., Color, US/Nigeria
In this documentary, Queer Gender-Non-Conforming Nigerian media artist Seyi Adebanjo tells a tale not often heard about gender and indigenous Yorùbá spirituality. ỌYA follows Seyi's journey to Nigeria...

Politics from a Black Woman's Insides
Yuko Edwards
1997, 26 min., Color, US
Follow one woman's search for the Hottentot Venus, the legendary link between ape and human and icon of black female subjectivity. Edwards's film explores the construction of race through both scienti...

Quienes Son?
Alex Stikich
Producer: A Fiacchino/Stikich Production
2002, 8 min., Color
In October 1962, the world was at a standstill. In response to the failed invasion of Cuba by the United States, the Soviet Union began a buildup of offensive missiles on the island. The United States...

Reflections
Kim Watson & Caleb Oglesby
1987, 6 min., Color, US
The voice and vision of Civil Rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. provide foundation for this short experimental video. Video image processing techniques, archival footage and original music...

A Refutation of Time
Dan Boord & Greg Durbin & Luis Valdovino
1997, 8 min., Color, US/Argentina
A student from the Large Midwestern Universe receives an unusual e-mail message in the Logic Lab. The communication concerns, the nature of time, tango singer Carlos Gardel, the humorist Will Rodgers,...

Remembering Wei Yi-fang, Remembering Myself.
Yvonne Welbon
1995, 30 min., Color, us/China
An autobiographical experimental documentary about the artist's experiences as an African-American woman living in Taiwan for six years. Recreations of time and place are presented through memories, h...

Ruins
Jesse Lerner
1999, 78 min., BW, US
Ancient Maya and Aztec objects have been shown in circuses, art galleries, World's Fairs and natural history museums. This experimental documentary suggests how diplomacy and Pan-Americanism recast a...

Secondhand (Pepe)
Hanna Rose Shell & Vanessa Bertozzi
2007, 24 min., Color, United States/Haiti/Canada
In this documentary about used clothing, the historical memoir of a Jewish immigrant rag picker intertwines with the present-day story of 'pepe' — secondhand clothing that flows from North America to ...

Shades
Jamika Ajalon
1994, 12 min., Color
SHADES explores the issues around dark and light skin in the African American community. Drawing on erotic imagery and the relation between a light skinned woman and a darker skinned Lesbian, this vid...

Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections On Ritual Space
Barbara McCullough
1980, 60 min., Color, US
This video investigates the use of ritual in the work of artists using different media. Here ritual is defined as the creation and utilization of objects, words or tones used in a repetitive or habitu...

Slanted Visions
Ming-Yuen S. Ma
1995, 50 min., Color
Working in collaboration with a diverse group of artists, writers, performers and musicians, many of them queer and Asian, Los Angeles-based media artist Ming-Yuen S. Ma has created a promiscuous mont...

Splash!
Thomas Allen Harris
1991, 10 min., Color, US
SPLASH is a fable-like tale of memory and emotion. Using a range of techniques, it deftly explores the interplay between identity, fantasy, gender, homosexual desire and pre-adolescence. These forces ...

Synchronized
Corinne Manabat Cueva
Producer: Corinne Manabat Cueva
2020, 6 min., Color, United States
SYNCHRONIZED is an experimental documentary short that embraces 5 women of color as they collectively reflect about their experiences living and thriving in Oakland. This will uncover their perspectiv...

This is Not Beirut/ There Was and There Was Not
Jayce Salloum
1994, 49 min., Color, Canada/China
A personal essay on the popular misrepresentation of Lebanon and Beirut which documents the filmmakers own experiences while working in Lebanon. Working with its own conceptual baggage, the video sit...

Toc Storee
Ming-Yuen S. Ma
1993, 21 min., Color, US
The first in a series by the artist addressing Asian/Pacific Islander Gay experiences, this multilevel narrative explores sexuality, identity, tradition and personal recollection through gay Asian sto...

Tongues of Heaven
Anita Chang, An-Chi Chen, Leivallyn Kainoa Kaupu, Monica Hau‘oli Waiau & Shin-Lan Yu
2013, 60 min., Color, US/Taiwan
Set in Taiwan and Hawai‘i, territories where the Austronesian family languages are spoken, TONGUES OF HEAVEN focuses on the questions, desires and challenges of young indigenous peoples to learn the l...

Turmeric Border-Marks
Christina Choe
2000, 25 min., Color
TURMERIC BORDER-MARKS is an experimental documentary set in modern Seoul, Korea, where an intersection becomes two stories of migration, globalization, hybrid identity, cracked mirrors and turmeric (a...

Undertow
Me-K Ahn
1995, 18 min., BW, US
"undertow" is an experimental short film which explores how the loss of family and culture can affect one's body consciousness and sexuality. It juxtaposes one adopted woman's reconstructed search for...

untitled part 3b: (as if) beauty never ends…
Jayce Salloum
2006, 11 min., Color, Canada
In this video essay about dystopia in contemporary times, Jayce Salloum presents raw footage documenting the 1982 massacre of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon. Working directly, viscerall...

Up to the South (Talaeen a Junuub)
Jayce Salloum & Walid Ra'ad
1993, 60 min., Color, Canada/Lebanon
An oblique, albeit powerful experimental documentary which examines the politics and economics of South Lebanon against the backdrop of the Israeli occupation. This video focuses on the social, intell...

Vintage: Families of Value
Thomas Allen Harris
1995, 72 min., Color, US
VINTAGE is an experimental documentary which looks at three African American families through the eyes of lesbian and gay siblings--including the filmmaker and his younger brother. Three groups of que...

Walking Home
Nuala Cabral
Producer: Third World Newsreel Workshop
2011, 4 min., BW, US
For the walkers, talkers and those who say nothing. WALKING HOME questions the acceptance of street harassment as a normal interaction between men and women....

Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification
Barbara McCullough
1979, 4 min., BW, US
An original and visionary work, this cathartic film links the present with the ancestral past. A graceful young African American woman emerges from the ruins of a crumbling building. She disrobes, and...

A Week with Azar
Tara Najd Ahmadi
Producer: Jurij Meden and Tara Najd Ahmadi
2018, 11 min., Color, US
A Week with Azar is a short experimental documentary film, based on a true story of Azar, an Iranian computer engineer living in the United States, who in the winter of 2017 failed to see her ill sist...

X 1/2: The Legacy of Malcolm X
Black Planet Productions
Producer: Black Planet Productions
1994, 45 min., Color, US
Set within the context of current African American struggles, this video examines the historical and contemporary legacies of Malcolm X. Using mixed media and experimental audio, X & 1/2 explores Blac...

Yanqui Walker and the Optical Revolution
Kathryn Ramey
2009, 33 min., Color, US/Nicaragua
This film explores a now-obscure American expansionist, William Walker, who through military force and coercion became president of Nicaragua in 1856. Walker was one of many expansionists who believed...

Yoni
Jyoti Mistry
1997, 20 min., Color
This provocative short film explores women's power, force and passion through an enigmatic series of images, erotic performances and tableaux vivant. Beautifully shot, it references as well as recreat...


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