Special program: Behold! Queer Film and Performance Series:
features multiple feature and shorts film and video programs that showcase works from and about the LGBTQ+ and Latinx communities in curated categories.
Transgressive Desire: Body Work from Queer Women, Trans, Nonbinary, and Intersex Short Filmmakers
Curated by Gina Young
What links these five short films is not just the inherently transgressive nature of queer women, trans, nonbinary and intersex people owning their unique desires and enacting their most radical fantasies, but also that all the filmmakers are performance artists in one form or another, who bring their comfort confronting a live audience to your screen as they turn the lens on their vulnerable and powerful bodies.
Queer(ing) Time
Curated by Dino Dinco & Juan Fernandez
An array of short and feature length films, largely from California-based queer and trans filmmakers and artists of color, that each in its own manner offers a glimpse into the cultural climate of its release date along with a distinct vision of the past and/or the future. The most recently made film in our program is Leo Herrera’s Queer Futurist The FATHERS Project (2020) in which Herrera intercuts both shot and re-purposed imagery through a hybrid genre he calls sci-fi documentary to imagine a queer utopia, if not jouissance, by reframing the impact of HIV/AIDS on queer history and queer future.The Dope Elf Films
Six short films by Gawdafful National Theater made between December 2020 and March 2021 during the global pandemic, and shot largely by the actors themselves with a little help through the windows of their homes. The company have spent the last ten years working together on theatrical installation-performances tipped toward issues of American power and violence. A message in a bottle from their halted touring production, The Dope Elf, a collection of six plays by Asher Hartman about molecular white supremacy and patriarchy evidenced in the minutiae of daily life, these films peer into the psyches of beings who are both human and non-human, violent and banal, creatures drawn from an American fascination with European myth and magic, whose love of violence and self-harm remain at the core of their shifting identities. Encountering ConstruX From Rick Castro to Gio Black Peter
There is only the encounter with one’s own projections. Encounter the construx of our filmmakers and perhaps find yourself in their works. Three short videos depicting the aesthetics, artists, talents, sights & sounds of Rick Castro’s legendary fetish Hollywood art Gallery~Antebellum. World artist Gio Black Peter breaths life unfettered by shame and unencumbered by fleeting notions of morality in his new short-film Sushi, a glimpse into a day with a family of prestigious art collectors and descendants of the Swine Burger fortune who meet to celebrate sex, drugs, and violence with candor.
d-ConstruX
Emerging artists break it down and start again. It’s a journey through six-short videos by two emerging artists. Jose Tinoco explores desire and connection through the endless bombardment of internet content while Izzy Bravo’s queer, de-tribed indigeneity merges a raunchy avante garde style that reflects emotional complex interactions through body, mind, and spirit.
Breathe
2 Short Films at the intersexion of dance and spoken word as a safe space.
féi hernandez‘ Our Lungs, Your Wings is a meditative contemplation of a new safe world and foreseeable future that is defined by and for trans and queer Black, Indigenous, People of Color.
Taso Papadakis & Kevin Williamson’s Safe and Sound explores queer love, pleasure, and safety in times of pain. The film is based on a dance-theater performance for queer dancers to resist structures of oppression and violence through cathartic movements and tender care. +++
“There is a connecting spirit to all of the works in Film Maudit 2.0, each selected to engage a different facet of the cinematic imagination,” says Festival Artistic Director Patrick Kennelly. “These radical “cinema-sations” are guaranteed to not just entertain, but to challenge the mind and shock the senses.
This year we wanted to acknowledge the dual power of both the theatrical experience and the streaming landscape for independent filmmakers. We’re excited about bringing local audiences back to our space in a safe, Covid-compliant manner (all screenings are vaccination & mask only) to experience the richness of the theatrical filmgoing experience while also giving a platform to films that typically would not screen locally in such a context. At the same time, we’re equally excited about making most of the films accessible to a wider national and international audience in an online setting (as we did last year).
We feel this is the exciting future of the festival-going experience, breaking down an exclusivity that has previously ghettoized the indie landscape (and its films/filmmakers) while at the same time allowing the participation and conversation of filmmakers across time-zones who wouldn’t have the ability to travel to festivals.
The festival is funded in part by the California Arts Council, L.A. County Department of Cultural Affairs and the City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs CAP Program.  (Days of Pentecost) | 
