BlackmanVision Film Production

What caught my eye and touched my soul in 2008.

1. Bird Club – performance art celebrating the queer feminine. Live, warm and moving.
2. The Genome Chronicles – film by John Akomfrah – commissioned for Donald Rodney Retrospect curated by Keith Piper. Painful, wistful, haunting
3. Transgender Film Festival – inclusive, innovative, challenging
4. Savage Grace – film by Tom Kalin about the doomed heiress Barbara Daly Baekeland and her son Antony – brave, exquisite costumes and cinematography, disturbing
5. MUST – Peggy Shaw and Clod Ensemble’s performance- raw, physical, sinuous, poetic
6. Survivors – TV series population survive deadly virus – uneven performances, integrated casting, 1 queer survivor, annoying, gripping
7. Club des Femmes – female cinema re-visited – political, feminist, counter culture
8. Femmes of Power – photographic essay on queer femininity eds. Del La Grace Volcano, Ulrika Dahl – visual, eclectic, much needed to shift the dominance of butch/andro imagery in queer culture

In 2009 I can’t wait for

1. Mississippi Damned – written and directed by Tina Mabry – three Black children try to escape their abusive situation
2. Push – directed by Lee Daniels based on the novel by Sapphire.
3. Weather Girl – film co-produced by Steak House comedy about an adult woman finding love

Taking the colonial adventures of Lord Edgerton as its starting point, the pleasure pavilion film tent hosts a weekend of films exploring the act of travel and the traveller’s encounters with the exotic which find echoes in the rare plants, architecture and garden design which were brought to Tatton by Lord Edgerton and his family. From the early images of spectacular landscapes first glimpsed in the simulated train carriages of Hales Tours to Peter Kulbelka’s satirical portrait of the safari in Unsere Africanse and Jean Rouch’s Les Maitres Fou.

Fem screens in the Femmetastic Programme in Inside Out Toronto’s Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

The venue is Royal Ontario Museum on the 25th May at 5pm

You can check out Broken Chain online and all the films in City Speaks programme on the BBC Film Network.