Michelle Handelman

A lonely and elderly widower struggles to come to terms with the loss of his wife and the circumstances surrounding her death. When he visits her grave, he encounters a little girl who shows him the path to healing and fills him with hope.

An original semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama very loosely inspired by Max Hechtman's adolescence and college experience as a young filmmaker.

In a Japanese-American family, the mother is stealing the terminally ill grandpa's morphine, the airhead sister is having sex with the family lawyer, one brother gets perfect grades but is hiding a secret gay love of skinheads, and the other brother is a junkie. Over the course of one evening, the family falls apart due to their bizarre behaviour.

Michelle Handelman’s new work, THESE UNRULY AND UNGOVERNABLE SELVES (2020), recontextualizes characters from her previous works into a hypnotic visual essay about the transfiguring of interiority during periods of isolation and fear. It takes as its starting point the current coronavirus pandemic and filters it through theorist Jill Casid’s writings on the necrocene, and Walter Benjamin's writings on identifying the difference between threshold and boundaries. Handelman's characters, who each have already struggled with existential questions of belonging and fear in her projects DORIAN, A CINEMATIC PERFUME (2009/11); IRMA VEP, THE LAST BREATH (2013/15); and HUSTLERS & EMPIRES (2018), are juxtaposed with found images and texts sourced during the pandemic to take on a new form that both denies and struggles with containment.

From pushy bottoms to macho femmes, Bloodsisters is an A–Z documentary guide that takes an in-depth look at the San Francisco Leatherdyke scene during the mid-nineties.

This docudrama presents the history of the telephone, updated and told from the point of view of a character who uses the screen as both a connection to intimacy and a condom for safe sex.

"Dorian, a cinematic perfume" is based on Oscar Wilde’s 19th century novel "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and its themes of decadence, narcissism and the meaning of art. I have interpreted the story and it’s queer undertones by casting Dorian as a young woman discovered by a fashion photographer, then catapulted into the world of empty celebrity. She falls under the tutelage of a famous drag queen and becomes a nightclub luminary, constantly followed by the paparazzi. These media images become the infamous portrait, grotesquely mutating as she grows more beautiful and famous, culminating in her own narcissistic destruction.

A woman imitating a man, imitating himself. Using the cut-up techniques of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, I edited this film using experimental out-takes and guided purely by intuition. The film sat around for a year without a soundtrack. Then, due to a homophobic incident, I plotted my revenge, locked myself in a sound booth and let loose. A revenge film that will have you falling out of your seat.