Peggy Ahwesh

A quartet of crack addicts in Miami sit around, while outside, the biggest hurricane of the century is about to hit. The Pixelvision camera roams restlessly through the apartment, focusing nervously on the tiniest details, but never staying in any one spot for very long. Meanwhile, the addicts engage in desultory conversation, or make phone calls, or tell stories about their past experiences.

A mockumentary following the troubled production of Clockmen: The Musical, focusing on a cosplayer-turned-actress who reacts to the stress of the production in a rather unusual way.

This film is depicts early lesbian sexuality, using reenacted scenes from the experience of a 12-year old girl as the platform for a meditation on forbidden desire, transgression, and Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of identity formation. Raw adolescent memories counterpoint staged scenes, exploring mechanisms of power and submission.

It begins with footage from a stylish old potboiler about an isolated convent, whose tale of passions leashed and unleashed provides the leitmotif for a young lesbian who watches it and the lonely nun she pursues and seduces. As the two women's lives come closer to joining, voiceovers from the biography of a 16th century lesbian nun and the reminiscences of a woman's closeted romances at a Catholic school flesh out the theme.

Here Ahwesh's heterogeneous textual approach comes to the fore, as she juxtaposes narrative, faux documentary, comedic and "serious" footage, and merges film, video, and Pixelvision. Suggestions and meanings accumulate: austere, theoretical text is interrupted by shots of women relating bawdy (sexist) jokes; classic R&B music plays while women stomp on records and pour alcohol on the floor. The Vision Machine is a fragmented inquiry into issues of gender, language and representation.

A short and inconclusive treatise on women and gambling. The allure of risk taking, the contradictions of excessive behavior and a penchant for failure combine in this fairytale set in the abandoned decay which was onced a glamorous Atlantic City. A sentimental education at the seashore off-season.

Thanksgiving in California is the setting in which the viewer experiences "the depression inherent to festive occasions. There were many things bothering me at this time, or maybe it was one thing that broke into many pieces.

A ramshackle underground SF satire set and shot in the self-absorbed art world of lower Manhattan, written, produced, and directed by Joe Gibbons, who also plays one of the lead parts. Gibbons plays a mad scientist who's developed a technique for transferring personalities from one person's body to another; he becomes obsessed with an outlaw artist (played by performance artist Karen Finley) who destroys paintings in various galleries as a form of anarchist, anticapitalist protest.

A music-filled tour of Christmas good cheer overtakes this gastronomically oriented excursion through the winter season of discontent and yuletime yearnings craving ignition.

Peggy Ahwesh re-edits and optically prints a Super 8 stag loop, rarifying the degraded images into an abstract stained-glass mosaic. From a clumsy and heavy-handed pornographic film of the seventies that bad storage conditions have deteriorated over time, Peggy Ahwesh uses the alterations and the mold of the film to emphasize the sensuality of the scenes. It produces a newborn, beautiful film, powerful, erotic, and disarming at a time.

Futuristic story of Carlos and Ben who fall in love in high school despite the racism and and homophobia. When Fundamentalist forces threaten to take over the U.S. the pair join forces with an underground resistance movement.

Martina and Sonja, cross-dress in vampire capes and werewolf claws, re-enacting familiar horror tropes. A corresponding soundtrack of stock screams and "scary" music suggests that the girls' toying with gender roles and power dynamics may have dire consequences.

Buddy, a young gay man leaves his small-town home in rural Upstate New York to make a new life in New York City.

An edible indelible organic oneiric mushroom movie made for Bradley Eros on his 70th Birthday!

A re-staging of Reich’s question, “Am I a Spaceman?”, at a cloudbuster near his laboratory in Rangeley, Maine. 2) A re-staging of the spaceman’s warning speech to earthlings in THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. Here the spaceship is replaced by WR’s tomb. - AFA

A home-movie paean to the Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom plumbs the depths of boudoir small talk. In the first part, a newly-acquainted odd couple discuss desire—and lack thereof—over a bag of potato chips. In the second part, a recumbent woman describes her partner and herself as "the John and Yoko of the '90s." ("We're in bed most of the time," she explains.) The two read aloud, nap and argue beneath the blankets. Ahwesh manipulates the image through chemical and mechanical means, gradually shifting the color scheme from blue to yellow.

The summer of 2020 I spent most nights outdoors alone transfixed by the theater of the stars and the dance of the fireflies. My sense of time expanded and slowed but the time-lapse camera condenses and speeds up the experience, in seeming contradiction. I waved my arms to trip the neighbors’ motion-sensitive lights to magical effect on the trees in my backyard.

Caldwell's pulp storytelling, proto-feminist stance and unabashed social dramatization of his characters are a distinct vision of the condition of women -- specifically working class women. His broadly drawn themes of small town hypocrisy and restrictive moral values contextualize the titular characters' struggle for sexual expression, stability and independence. Certain Women is a disconcerting parable that pays tribute to but also defies the 50s period style of Caldwell, opting for contemporary small town situations and cinematic style. This cautionary tale of four heroic yet ordinary women is fashioned out of the past but relies on observations of the present historical moment and its political reality.

Seven years of celestial field recordings gathered from the chaos of the cosmos and inscribed onto 16mm film from various locations upon this turning tripod Earth.

Refashioning the original intention of footage lifted from an online animated news outlet, The Falling Sky is a cautionary tale about the inexplicable sea and the tumultuous sky—a poetic tour through the dense landscape of recent news in a recap of human foibles, follies and crises that are increasingly out of alignment with the forces of nature.

Investigates memory and the uncanny through the experience of hypnotized subjects who communicate via a glacial and slow storytelling informed by suggestion and the working of the unconscious. Art is the ape of nature—the imitation, the mirror, the follies of human invention that strive for the divine. Inspired by Herzog’s 'Heart of Glass,' the performers evoke a murky past and foreshadow a dystopic future.

Like a generation of viewers, I was profoundly affected by Deliverance. But I have always been troubled by the hegemonic structures of gender proposed by Boorman and Dickey. Hence, my version is played by women: myself, Peggy Ahwesh, Jackie Goss, Su Friedrich, and Meredith Root, all experimental filmmakers who work as academics. While faithful to our respective male characters, we also play ourselves. -- Jennifer Montgomery

A fragment from an unfinished project by Peggy Ahwesh.

Fragments from movies found in an abandoned cinema in Beirut. Retrieved by Mr. Salloum. Assembled by Ms. Ahwesh.