Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance

A series of collective dreams of a transworldly being visits a myriad of characters, revealing their subconscious desires.

Filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax returns to his rural Michigan hometown following the death of his infant niece and the subsequent arrest of his brother-in-law as the culprit. Using the audio-visual approaches of essay film, first-person cinema vérité, staged actions, and decades of home movies, Madsen navigates a town steeped in opioid addiction, economic depression, and religious fervor, while using the act of filmmaking to rebuild familial bonds and reimagine justice. Posing empathy as a tool for creating a more just world, North By Current does not seek to investigate a crime, but creates a relentless portrait of an enduring pastoral family, poised to reframe and reimagine narratives about incarceration, addiction, trans embodiment, and ruralness.

At Babe’s Bar, cribbage tournaments overlap with punk shows, while drag performances weave through afternoons of football and potluck chili. “One Night at Babe’s” takes an intimate glimpse into the life of a rural queer bar and its dynamic intersection of patrons to trace a tenuous yet rich alliance.

​A queer woman is pregnant. The self-made family unit of two dykes and a trans man imagine a kind of erotic magic that will allow for procreation based solely on desire. Together they enact a public sex ritual to symbolize their hopefulness for multiplicity, acknowledging their cyborg bodies as technological interventions. When the queer woman miscarries her child, the three begin to build their own mythic understanding of where bodies live when they are not inside us. They create a story to trace movement of the non-body, from a hole, to a river, to a room. Images of an imaginary white room, an ikea-esque torture chamber of stillness, haunt them. As a parallel emerges between the pregnant body and the trans body, the techno-sex act becomes the key and a pyramid becomes the portal to access this other world of non-bodied existence.

A death and destruction-obsessed transsexual searches for human connection in the humid Southern underground worlds of internet hook-ups and storm tunnels.​

A BODY TO LIVE IN offers an uncompromising look at the rise of BDSM performance art, body modification and the ‘modern primitives’ cultural movement through the agonies and ecstasies of transgressive artist Fakir Musafar and the communities that surrounded him. Blending rare archival footage with the voices of queer and artistic trailblazers, the film shows how pain, ritual, and transformation became tools of identity, survival, and self-expression. Weaving from early experiments and secret gatherings to the emergence of a global subculture shaped by the AIDS crisis and spiritual reinvention, Director Angelo Madsen (NORTH BY CURRENT) reveals not just the story of one artist, but a collective history of bodies in revolt - asking what it truly means to live freely in one’s own skin.

A mystical voice contemplates mythology, science fiction, sexuality and death as a series of holes: through which to travel, through which to perceive, through which to accept, through which to speak.

Angelo Madsen Minax mined 80 hours of footage, all from the year 1970, from the vaults of a Dallas TV station to construct a kinetic montage where ”the news anchors are reimagined as pseudo-divine bearers of a potential truth, transplanted from 50 years in the past and appearing before our eyes to weave a proclamation of impending doom. In poetic decree, we are told in great detail the peril of our world, yet offered no explanation of how to prevent it, nor the definitive cause. From past images, a future-image is constructed” (AMM).

How shall I cater best to your desire for me to be visible? Set up as a confessional-cum-guided meditation, My Structuralist Film uses performance artist Tehching Hsieh's One Year Performance (“Time Clock Piece”) as a framework to illustrate the filmmaker's (presumable) insides. How thoroughly should a trans body want or need to be visible? On what terms is the filmmaker obligated to narrativize, perform, or even fabricate visibility for the sake of an audience? Considering the limits and limitations of disclosure, this project positions the act of looking not as an offering or an exchange, but as an unyielding neoliberal, capitalist thirst to consume.

It is the 4th of July in a small river town in middle America and the water levels are rising.

A voice guides us through a near-death experience. She begins by describing the experience as a sensation of viewing, similar to watching a movie. Found footage and animated skyscapes create a cosmology of connections. On-screen text is sourced from “The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps”, a 1998 book by Marshall T. Savage.

At once contained and cosmic, Angelo Madsen Minax’s Bigger on the Inside is a psychedelic and deeply moving reflection on desire, human connection, and — in its words — a crisis of contact.