PERFORMATORIUM FESTIVAL OF QUEER PERFORMANCE 11 •
QUEER CITY CINEMA FILM FESTIVAL 20
September 12-14, 2024

See the Festival Program here.

Its been a journey. Just a small town girl. Just a city boy. From mediation and appropriation to representation and assimilation. Take the midnight train. Go anywhere. Everything in a little black case. Chart the course. A singer in a smoky room. Revolution hiding in plain sight.

From inauthenticity to authenticity. The smell of wine and cheap perfume. From indirect and illegible to proud and raging. From sublimating and modulating to authorial. Left to your own devices.

From campy, sincere, matter-of-fact and resourceful to ceasing as category. A palimpsest that goes on and on, and on, and on. Shadows searching in the night. Streetlights, people. Living just to find emotion. Hiding somewhere in the night. Transformation. It’s (its) about time!

– Text by Jamie Cooper, August 2024 – with lyrics from Don’t Stop Believin’ by Journey

To journey is about time. We begin and end and in-between we do something. What that something is, is a combination of personal circumstances and characteristics, and a seismic mix of other social and cultural inspirations and aspirations, influences, barriers and interferences.

For some Queer and QTBIPOC identities, our journeys are particularly and unavoidably harrowing and exhausting – requiring us to understand that our differences can provoke hate, while learning how to navigate, accept and love our own identifications while being challenged, thwarted and confronted by an unending xenophobic terrain.

Searching for meaning, seeking reassurance and finding a way through and overcoming the phobic bramble and muck of the world is, for better or worse, part of our journey.

Through the thick smog and climate of hate, we somehow locate each other, where we embrace and nurture our difference, our funk, our strife, our fierceness, our fearlessness, our queerness and our fuck-you-ness. In turn we celebrate the joy and pleasure of being other and in doing so, engender change, resolution, revolution and arrival.

Our journey is simultaneously informed by invisibility, struggle and activism of the past, the gains and accomplishments through visibility and the pro-active presence of now, and disturbingly, a seemingly uncertain and disconcerting future.

This years festival addresses all of the above as a means to ponder what it means to journey, how the word journey evokes romantic ideas with regard to time, existence and ‘being’ and journey as a framework to disseminate the work of Queer and QTBIPOC artists and their expressions and identities through film, live art and discussion.

Enjoy your time…

Gary Varro
Executive & Artistic Director
Queer City Cinema & Performatorium Festival of Queer Performance

speaking of time and journey – this year marks QCC’s 30th year of germination!!

JOURNEY EIGHT:
6:30pm, Saturday, September 14
REGINA PUBLIC LIBRARY FILM THEATRE, 2311 12TH AVENUE – LOWER LEVEL

Total Running Time: 68 Minutes

Nature
Andrew James Patterson, 5:00
Nature is comprised of downloaded video clips of landscapes, caves, animals, and bodies of water. ‘Nature’ has long been a loaded word. What is natural? What is art or artifice? Do human eyes automatically transform landscapes or rock formations into sculptures? Are the words nature and culture antonyms or synonyms? This five-minute video does not contain verbal language but rather an original musical composition.

Concrete Shape
Jesi Jordan, 5:02
To face your fear, you must let it enter your life as a Concrete Shape. An onsite video performance by Jesi Jordan created at the Diego Rivera Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City. This film is made using hand made special effects and biodegradable materials such as Oaxacan clay, lava rocks, chicken eggs, cactus husks, and water.

Thorn on her side
Vjosana Shkurti, 5:27
A human narrates the story of a bad dream after buying a gorgeous plant at the market. What starts as an innocent encounter to relieve loneliness from isolation becomes a nightmarish seduction scene between a plant and its human. Together they give birth to a new creature.

Spermwhore
Anna Linder, 12:30
A queer experimental film about unwanted childlessness in a world where normative heterosexual relationships dictate who can become parents and in what way. When it comes to reproduction our merciless bodies reduce us to merely a set sex or given gender. But the longing for children is not limited to our bodies, and the possibility of pregnancy can be gifted, shared and undertaken together.

Pic Pic
Carol-Ann Belzil-Normand, 6:49
Pic Pic is an experimental animated film that metaphorically and conceptually reveals an erotic and exhilarating dimension of touching. The haptic relationship with the pin screen reveals forms and a primitive language that evoke a sensual relationship with the device.

Dancing Bodies
Laure Giappiconi, Elisa Monteil & La Fille Renne, 5:42
Dancing Bodies is a joyful and suxual ode to sorority.

jeny303
Laura Huertas Millán, 7:00
Born out of an ‘objective hazard’, (a 16mm roll where two different subjects were imprinted by mistake), jeny303 is a composite work intertwining two portraits.

The Taking of Jordan (All American Boy)
Kalil Haddad, 7:38
Jordan, an amateur adult performer, recalls the horror of his many former lives.

Goddess of Speed
Frédéric Moffet, 8:21
A film titled Dance Movie (or, alternatively, Rollerskate) appears in many Warhol filmographies, but no work with this title has been found in the archive. The lost film, starring dancer Fred Herko, was shot in 1963. A year later, Herko leaped out of an open window while dancing to Mozart’s Coronation Mass in C Major. Inspired by descriptions of the missing film and the memoir of Herko’s best friend, the poet Diane Di Prima, Goddess of Speed poetically reimagines the last days of the young performer.

through the bushes and the trees, you’ll find me
Morgan Sears-Williams, 3:38
through the bushes and the trees, you’ll find me intertwines the personal and political histories of Hanlan’s Point Beach, the site of Canada’s first pride gathering in the early 1970s. A strategically placed hole punch serves as a symbolic peephole, reflecting the cruising areas on the beach that invite both spectatorship and participation. This work was made by hole punching frame by frame using a cricut machine, then manually taping together 10,000+ frames.