I am pleased to announce the launch of www.queerfeast.com
Queer Feast is a quartet of tasty courses. Each is a distinct work; collectively they create a multi-course meal of lesbian identity played out through its pleasures, complications, and contradictions. Queer Feast, created at the intersection of digital’s interactivity and film’s linearity, offers a new way to experience storytelling.
As American As Apple Pie (1999)
What happens after the first kiss is over? A typical love story about food, family, work, compromises, and adultery. Twenty-two scenes randomly accessed reveal a different trajectory of Cilla’s and Luce’s relationship each time you play it. Along the way you’ll learn how to make an apple pie.
Cocktails & Appetizers (2001)
An homage to Lesbian pulp fiction of the fifties. We eavesdrop at a cocktail party and from the swirling snippets of gossip construct a story of Max and Jesse falling into bed and love.
Mixed Greens (2004)
A do-it-yourself movie about identity, belonging, and the things we desire. A salad of forty-eight scenes tosses together two stories: four generations of my Irish Jewish heritage play against four decades of lesbian life in America, challenging our ideas of the rewards and price of assimilation.
Leftovers (2014)
What does a photograph reveal about a life or a community? Norma and Virginia lived together in Chicago for almost fifty years. They left behind over two thousand snapshots of their friends and lovers as they played, posed, worked, partied, and aged. How do snapshots construct our identity? How does their meaning change over time, even after our death? And why did two women who lived life so fully and publically in a large lesbian community end their lives in such an isolating, dark closet?
I’m currently crowd funding for, Lives:Visible. The heart of this film is a trove of over 2000 snapshots taken by women in Chicago’s pre-stonewall lesbian community from the mid 1930s to the 1970s. The snapshots provide a rare look at a vanished and vibrant Lesbian culture: images of lovers and friends as they played, posed, worked, partied, drank, and aged. The film already received funding from the city of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events and Columbia College Chicago. In addition, the project has been designated a 3 Arts Foundation Artist Project. This allows Lives:Visible to be crowd funded through the 3 Arts Foundation; the foundation provides a third of the funds raised with a matching grant and all donations are tax deductible. I made my goal and now I’m stretching it! With additional money I can hire actors to read the love letters and love poems that Norma wrote in the 1930s and 1940s. Please help if you can. Crowd funding closesApril 12th at midnight. Donate
For a peek, please go to www.livesvisible.com
Enjoy the work and I would really appreciate it if you would spread the word.
Thank you,
Michelle Citron
michelle@michellecitron.com
www.michellecitron.com
P.S. Here are two great articles about Queer Feast:
▪ Kathleen Scott has as extended analysis of www.queerfeast.com in JumpCut No. 54, fall 2012. The article can be found at: http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/KScottQueerfeast/index.html
▪ Sophie Mayer devotes a book chapter to Mixed Greens, one of the four courses ofQueer Feast. “If I Am (Not) For Myself,” can be found in The Cinema of Me: Self and Subjectivity in First-Person Documentary, Ed. Alisa Lebow, Columbia University Press, NY, 2012
For information about my films, please contact Women Make Movies www.wmm.com
And if you’re interested in viewing another piece that examines family images, please view Jewish Looks at http://sfonline.barnard.edu/cf/jewishlo.html
