Sarah Schulman

A young black lesbian filmmaker probes into the life of The Watermelon Woman, a 1930s black actress who played 'mammy' archetypes.

With things growing a bit stale in the bedroom, lesbian couple Claudia and Dylan agree to seek sexual experiences outside their relationship. Dylan discovers new pleasures at a sex club, while Claudia, in drag as Claude, finds a surprising partner.

Former Warhol Superstar and creator of the seminal sexual politics performance spectacular Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore!, Penny Arcade, washed up on the shores of the Lower East Side of New York as a teenager in 1967. After decades in the Downtown art world, Penny’s personal relationships with dozens of outrageous characters, from the world famous to the fascinatingly obscure, led to the creation of the Lower East Side Biography Project, an oral history of New York’s Bohemian culture from the 1950s to the present. These half-hour biographies have broadcast weekly on Time Warner Manhattan Cable Television for 20 years. Beyond Queer is a feature documentary compiled from these television interviews.

A documentary about queer realities and cultural amnesia.

Two middle-aged lesbian couples accidentally kill a younger girl and decide to cover it up. But their crime comes back to haunt them when an unexpected stranger appears in their lives, bringing tension and discord.

A radical revisitation. This updated version of Stephen Winter’s 2015 film unearths the ghosts of Jason and Shirley, restaging the volatile 12-hour shoot of the 1967 documentary Portrait of Jason—held at the Chelsea Hotel—which blurred the line between subject and storyteller. Jason Holliday, a sharp-witted Black gay man, whose identity splits between personas–performer, hustler, muse, provocateur–is once again in the room with Shirley Clarke, the Oscar-winning filmmaker who insisted on framing his life. Now, with newly unearthed footage, the director returns 10 years later, not to resolve the contradictions, but to reopen them. What was once a document becomes a haunting, a conversation with what was left outside the frame. Time folds. Power shifts. And Jason, still impossible to contain, speaks back.

Actors workshop an allegorical and fictional new musical for an audience of one, who holds the fate of the play in her hands.

United in Anger: A History of ACT UP is an inspiring documentary about the birth and life of the AIDS activist movement from the perspective of the people in the trenches fighting the epidemic. Utilizing oral histories of members of ACT UP, as well as rare archival footage, the film depicts the efforts of ACT UP as it battles corporate greed, social indifference, and government negligence.