First Breath on Mars

Crystal Lake is about a group of young girls who take over a skate park, forming an all-female force field on the half pipe. There on the reclaimed ramp, with no boys around, they are thriving and visible. This is an anthem for young feminists, which presents female friendship as a means to survive adolescence.

An epic anthology feature film event combining 25 shorts from different queer directors worldwide, each telling a story based on a color/fetish of the infamous hanky code.

"Leather Graves" is an experimental 16mm film that explores the permeable boundaries between queer exile and queer utopia. Cruising amongst gravestones engraved with references to queer culture and sexuality, queers defy death by devouring candy-coated blossoms. The queer epitaphs in "Leather Graves" were created with an in-camera double exposure technique using a Bolex camera and a matte-box. The cast and crew are all trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, and/or femme queer people.

Shot at sites of nuclear development, detonation, industry, tourism, and activism, "RUN!" examines the ways that ideologies of war structure landscapes, community rituals, cinematic technology, entomology, pandemic management, and even notions of LGBTQ liberation.

Through the process of contact printing, hand processing, and low-fi optical printing, Gossamer Walls remembers, mis-remembers, and reinterprets a previous generation’s super 8 home movies.

Caught in a system of confinement, surveillance, and restriction, a leather outlaw eludes the state by recalling his lover bathed in Vaseline.

In psychoanalytic theory, a dream of a fallen tooth represents fears of castration. In Magnetic Resonance, a cicada falls to its death and New Wave musician Marc Almond falls to the feet of Clint Ruin; a tooth stands in for a brain tumor and the naked legs of the filmmakers on a sheet-less mattress stand in for Almond and Ruin’s performance on stage. "Castrated" bodies become conduits of attraction.

Using appropriated text and images, the story of a housefly who transitions into a man in order to cruise a gay bar.

Plastic Aortas is a portrait of the black plastic encasing the Fells Reservoir in the unceded land of the Massachusett, Pawtucket, and Naumkeag indigenous peoples. The lining was placed there by conservationists in order to mitigate the invasive Common Reed, which is killing native plants. However, the lining also interferes with wildlife and contaminates the water. The film’s title references Roland Barthes' 1957 essay, "Plastic," in which he writes, “The hierarchy of substances is abolished: a single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticized, and even life itself since, we are told, they are beginning to make plastic aortas.” 65 years after Barthes’ essay was published, in 2022, microplastics were found in human blood and, in 2023, in human heart tissue. In this 16mm film, tension rises between the benefits and hazards of plastic or, as Barthes describes, between plastic and “life itself.”

A remake of Jack Smith's 1969 film, Song for Rent.

Against a backdrop of electrocution, dominance, and scientific precision, wasps nest in an abandoned refrigerator, eyelashes flutter, curtains blow in open windows, and queers congregate. Adapting Stanley Milgram's 1963 experiment on obedience to authority, "Gold Moon, Sharp Arrow" explores how queer communities reenact, resist, and respond to assimilation, coercion, and trauma.

Individual film frames document cycles of destruction, resilience, and transformation within the Bay Area. Shots include the abandoned Parkway Theater in Oakland, closed in 2009; filmmaker Mary Helena Clark in her Berkeley studio; the Black Hole Cinematheque in Oakland, founded by Tooth; historical images of the 1906 San Francisco fire; pool tides in the remaining structure of the Sutro Baths, first built in 1896 and knocked down by arson in 1966; and the dormant Woodminster amphitheater, built in the late 1930’s under Roosevelt’s New Deal project.

"I Wake Up with a Flower in my Hand" is a 25-year anniversary remix of "Killer Janitors." Using all original footage and adding no special effects, the new cut focuses on how the best friends saw each other and understood themselves within the context of their friendship, high school, home lives, and a world beyond their small-town confinements—felt but not yet touched.

To clutch. To grasp.

I practice being thirty-two by biking around Oakland and dressing the same as I did at age fourteen.

A field guide from the Oakland Hills, with Rachel Zingoni.