Two queer filmmakers – Celeste Chan and Irina Contreras – join forces to create a queer film mixtape from footage found in the San Francisco GLBT archives. After spending months digging and unearthing the archival memory of queer life, Celeste and Irina have pieced together an extraordinary short film that traverses bars, protests, street life, activism and the underground world of queer culture.
A collaborative film commissioned by Radar Productions and Queering The Castro in 2016, Celeste Chan and Irina Contreras were given access to the GLBT archives in San Francisco, CA. The archives are comprised of documented and catalogued footage of everything from everyday life to protests, interviews, art projects, documentaries, audio and more. After spending months unearthing the archival memory of queer life in moving images, Chan and Contreras pieced together an extraordinary short film that traverses bars, protests, street life, activism and the underground world of queer culture.The project involved studying the “raw image” as a branded image of the archive. The mixtape highlights the eroding of images taken via outmoded technology such as the VHS cameras used to videotape ACT UP marches and early AIDS vigils, as well as documentation of the news in the late 70's in the Bay Area. Most footage re-sites manifest destiny and queerness/gayness, queer and trans person of color bodies, femme bodies as entertainment, gentrification and the policing of black and brown bodies at the expense of Gay Liberation. Furthermore, the project asks who gets to remembered? Who gets to be archived?
Celeste Chan is a queer writer, filmmaker, teaching artist, and organizer, schooled by DIY and immigrant parents from Malaysia and the Bronx, NY. She is a Hedgebrook, Lambda, and VONA fellow - and recent Sister Spit alum. From 2008-2018, Celeste co-directed Queer Rebels, a queer and trans people of color arts project. They have toured work to GLITCH festival, Entzaubert, What's Your Flavor, OUTsider, MIX NYC, Korea Queer Film Festival, and beyond. She recently launched two more community writing workshops: Writing Rainbow: QTPOC FREE School, and Queer Ancestors Project Writes (for youth 18-24). Her newest documentary, ART Heart: Children of Riot Grrrl and Queercore (with Elliat Graney-Saucke), will screen as a rough cut this summer at the National Queer Arts Festival.
Irina Contreras is an interdisciplinary artist and writer, whose individual and collaborative projects examine personal reflections of collective experiences. Her performances and videos have been featured in venues throughout the US and abroad in Haiti, Germany, France, Mexico and more. Irina's community work spans accountability and restorative justice alongside alternative economic structures including giving circles, fundraising and more centered on QTPOC. She is the founder of the 12 year-old project, The Miracle Bookmobile and has worked for fifteen years at the intersections of the arts, public education and pedagogy within institutional and community based platforms.
This screening is made possible with the generous support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
