Sarah Schulman

Based on a true story, Jason and Shirley recreates the 1966 power struggle between Jewish, Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Shirley Clarke and her subject, Jason Holiday, a fierce black gay queen over a 12-hour marathon filming session which gave rise to Clarke's iconic documentary Portrait of Jason.

A young black lesbian filmmaker probes into the life of The Watermelon Woman, a 1930s black actress who played 'mammy' archetypes.

The film examines the ways that women directors have contributed to this genre and emphasizes the role that the media play in representation of sexuality and gender, underscoring the power that film has to shape our perceptions of one another. Visually, this documentary comes to life on screen through compelling and intimate original interviews, intercut with emotionally-charged archival footage, photographs, ephemera, inspired music, and film clips.

“Hooters!” explores lesbian culture, with humor, insight, and artistry, through the collaborative film making process used in Cheryl Dunye’s new seminal film, “The Owls”.

Two middle-aged lesbian couples accidentally kill a younger girl and decide to cover it up. But their crime comes back to haunt them when an unexpected stranger appears in their lives, bringing tension and discord.

Winner of the Best Short Film at the Hamburg Lesbian & Gay Film Festival in 1995, Hubbard’s highly personal experimental work, Memento Mori, is a moving, queer meditation that individualizes the immeasurable collective trauma left in the wake of the AIDS epidemic. Stylistically, Hubbard powerfully departs from the small film gauge formats that dominate his documentary work, instead utilizing widescreen Cinemascope that serves to illuminate the enormous scale of loss for each individual that has perished. Through the artful juxtaposition of universal imagery of death and ritual, deliberate close-ups of a human skull to the scattering of ashes, Hubbard’s dream-like elegy transports the viewer to a deep, universal state-of-consciousness that anyone that has lost a loved one will instantly recognize. The resulting depth of emotion and empathy serves as both a mournful prayer and an indelible filmic monument to the dead.

THANK GOD I'M A LESBIAN is an uplifting and entertaining documentary about the diversity of lesbian identities. Dionne Brand, Nicole Brossard, Lee Pui Ming, Becki Ross, Julia Creet, LaVerne Monette, Sarah Schulman, Chris Bearchell, Chris Phibbs, Christine Delphy and Jeanelle Laillou speak frankly and articulately about issues ranging from coming out, racism, bisexuality, and SM, to the evolution of the feminist and lesbian movements, outing and compulsory heterosexuality. Inclusive of various and often contradictory points of view, THANK GOD I'M A LESBIAN successfully proposes an alternate vision of self and community that is realistic and positive. This fast-paced documentary was edited by Geraldine Peroni who was nominated for an Academy Award for The Player.

A documentary about queer realities and cultural amnesia.

Former Warhol Superstar and creator of the seminal sexual politics performance spectacular Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore!, Penny Arcade, washed up on the shores of the Lower East Side of New York as a teenager in 1967. After decades in the Downtown art world, Penny’s personal relationships with dozens of outrageous characters, from the world famous to the fascinatingly obscure, led to the creation of the Lower East Side Biography Project, an oral history of New York’s Bohemian culture from the 1950s to the present. These half-hour biographies have broadcast weekly on Time Warner Manhattan Cable Television for 20 years. Beyond Queer is a feature documentary compiled from these television interviews.