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.

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.

Through an unconventional narrative structure, Staff’s video cuts together a narration of Heinrich von Kleist’s play The Prince of Homburg with interviews, conversation, found footage, hand painted animation and song. In a series of fragmented ‘daytime’ sequences, a range of artists, writers and performers reflect on contemporary queer and trans identity and its proximity to desire and violence. Intercut with flashes of the sun and sky, city streets and text, subjects include Sarah Schulman, Che Gossett, Macy Rodman and Debra Soshoux. Each of these segments is punctuated by ‘night-time' diversions, narrated by writer Johanna Hedva in the dual role of both narrator and Prince.