Politics of the Heart

Barbara Hammer’s Audience is a fascinating deep cut from the director’s prodigious filmography. Relatively raw in its design, this 16mm diary of audience reactions at retrospectives of Hammer’s work in San Francisco, London, Toronto, and Montreal in the early 1980s bears none of the distinctive visual flourishes and essayistic form one usually finds in her filmmaking. Today, Audience serves as an invaluable historical archive, providing quick but complex portraits of lesbian scenes in different cities and countries: the San Francisco women are bold and raucous, treating Hammer like a celebrity; the London crowd more reserved and tentative; the Canadians politely critical after initial hesitation. It also functions as a testament to the power of Hammer herself as a figure of lesbian culture, showing how fully she engages audiences to incite new forms of discourse about representation.

President Bush's call for an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to enshrine a heterosexual definition of marriage ignited a wave of civil disobedience same-sex marriages across the USA. "One Summer in New Paltz" focuses on the small village of New Paltz, NY, where the mayor, Jason West, began performing same-sex marriages on the steps of village hall and 1000s of couples flooded the village seeking to be married. The film goes on to document civil disobedience same-sex marriages and demonstrations across New York State, the Nyack Ten legal suit against New York state and the first day of legal same-sex marriages in Boston Massachusetts in May 2004. "One Summer in New Paltz", probes into the debate on same-sex marriage examining the intersection of same-sex marriage, war, the Constitution, race and the family. A strong work about grass roots organizing, straight/gay alliances and confrontation with state repression.

On July 20th, 2005, Canada became the fourth country in the world to extend the right to marry to lesbian and gay couples. The End of Second Class traces the story through the voices of three couples from Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia, and key activists and human rights lawyers who were at the forefront of the battle.

A moving examination of the struggle to decriminalize homosexuality in contemporary India, told through the voices of HIV AIDS workers, queer activists, community leaders and legal experts.