Free For All – LGBTQ Spotlight with Bushwick Film Festival
May 25, 2016 • 7pm – 9pm
BRIC House Stoop
647 Fulton Street
(Enter on Rockwell Place)
Brooklyn
Free screenings and conversation at BRIC House. BRIC FLIX offers premieres, shorts, new media projects and web series that all reflect the diversity and vibrancy of Brooklyn. Each screening is followed by a discussion with the filmmakers, artists, curators and more.
BRIC FLIX has partnered with Bushwick Film Festival to bring you an exciting evening of LGBTQ films.
Moderator:
Tiq Milan has been an advocate in the LGBT community for over a decade. An educator and mentor, he began doing grassroots advocacy in the Bronx and at the Hetrick-Martin Institute, home to the only all LGBT high school in the country Harvey Milk High. He is also a writer and journalist who carved a niche for himself as a media advocate and one of the leading voices for transgender equality. He has won several awards for his media advocacy from organizations like The Hispanic Black Gay Coalition, Black Transman Advocacy Inc., The National Trans Latina Coalition and The National Pride Index. He’s also been recognized by BET, Ebony Magazine, and MTV.
Panelists:
Trae Harris (Actress) who has appeared in the Wire and Orange is the New Black http://www.traeharris.com/. She will show her film-Newlyweeds, a match made in stoner heaven turns into a love triangle gone awry when Lyle can’t decide which matters most, Nina or Mary Jane.
Jess X Chen (Poet) is a multi-disciplinary artist/activist, filmmaker and poet currently living in New York City. After the Cultural Revolution, her parents immigrated from rural Nanchang, China to Canada in 1989. Her work exposes narratives of diasporic time travel, intimacy and collective protest by connecting the traumas between the queer and colored body and the body of the Earth. Through film, mural-making, poetry and youth art education, she is working toward a future where migrant and indigenous youth of color see themselves whole and heroic, on the big screen and the city walls & then grow up to create their own.
Jay Daniels (Filmmaker) his documentary explores the intersection of Jay’s Orthodox Jewish community and their gender identity, and how one suppresses the other.
Jeremy Hersh (Playwright/ Filmmaker) is a playwright and filmmaker based in New York. His most recent short film, NATIVES, screened at over 25 festivals worldwide including: SXSW, The New Orleans Film Festival, Outfest, BFI Flare, and The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian/SWAIA Showcase. Out Of Order magazine called it “the beginning of what will be a sterling career.”About Natives: Rachel and Anita, a young Manhattanite couple, are visiting Anita’s parents on the Indian reservation she grew up on, for the first time as a couple. Anita, estranged from her parents, wants the fact that they are a couple to be kept secret. In private moments Rachel fights to convince Anita that they should come out to Anita’s parents and in public tries to build a relationship of her own with Anita’s parents, chiefly by demonstrating her reverence for Indian culture–a culture which Anita has no interest in. As Rachel’s attempts to connect with the parents become more and more desperate, Anita begins to question whether her background is what attracted Rachel to her in the first place.
Daniel Armando (Filmmaker) is a writer and producer, known for Boys Like You (2011), Daddy’s Boy (2016) and Love Me Anyway (2014). Will show one of the two movies;
What It Was– Hollywood Actress Adina J. Spencer faces her past and confronts her identity when she returns back to New York.
Boys Like You– Sal, a shy, young photographer, is at the peak of his frustration with himself and his roommate, the carefree and hedonistic Jimmy. After an awkward photo shoot between the two, Sal finds himself at odds with both his sexuality and his feelings towards Jimmy. All comes to a head when the two have a candid conversation over drinks that leads to actions unexpected, further complicating Sal’s predicament.
Billy Gerard Frank (Filmmaker) will show a clip of Absence of Love, an intimate and taut portrait of three lives: James and Michael, on the far side of a once passionate romance, and James and Samuel, estranged brothers, coming to terms with their father’s death. “Absence of Love” is an intimate and taut portrait of three lives: James and Michael, on the far side of a once passionate romance, and James and Samuel, estranged brothers, coming to terms with their father’s death, a former minister of a small Atlanta parish. Billy Gerard Frank refreshes the clichés of the coming-of-age film (and family drama) with a intense story of lost – and found – love.