Family

Adapted from a performance by the same name, this courageous video fuses autobiographical material with information about how an alcoholic family perpetuates addictive behavior. Elements of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, such as the “Hi, my name is...” introduction are used along with photo-montage and a disjointed narrative. In addition to being shown at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum, Trick Or Drink has been used regularly by hospitals and alcohol treatment centers throughout the United States.

Made collaboratively with the filmmaker's mom Deborah, I Can Hear My Mother’s Voice documents her process of learning how to use the filmmaker's video camera. As Deborah watches the footage she has recorded, she reacts to and describes the footage she sees––showing what and how she sees––while opening up a space between sense, memory, speculation, and grief.

The film is open captioned and audio described in English. Still image description: Light sparkles on blue water. A caption at the bottom of the image reads: "that's beautiful."

Sea In The Blood is a personal documentary about living with illness, tracing the relationship of the artist to thalassemia in his sister Nan, and AIDS in his partner Tim. At the core of the piece are two trips. The first is in 1962, when Richard went from Trinidad to England with Nan to see a famous hematologist interested in her unusual case. The second is in 1977 when Richard and Tim made the counterculture pilgrimage from Europe to Asia. The relationship with Tim blossomed, but Nan died before their return.

Between job losses, foreclosures, living with family, and the Cande’s constant desire to return to Mexico, Pancha and Cande work through the strains of their marital relationship in San Diego County. Not able to have a house of their own, they resume the calmer life of renters, ending with a celebration of Cande’s 58th birthday. 

Paternal Rites is a first-person essay film that examines the secret underbelly of a contemporary Jewish American family as they grapple with the aftereffects of physical and sexual abuse on their present-day lives. It is also a groundbreaking film about the nature of trauma and memory itself: the ways in which trauma encrypts in uncanny ways; the function of speech and narrative in the process of decryption; and the role of film and filmmaking in the practice of healing.

five more minutes is an exploration of grief. Two women spend an afternoon recreating lost time. What begins as play-acting breaks open into a world where the tenderness and sorrow of having to say goodbye exist untempered.

I Stare at You and Dream is a slice of life melodrama that journeys to the core of interrelationships. This film juxtaposes and links the lives of four people: the filmmaker, Susan Mogul; her friend, Rosie Sanchez; Rosie’s teenage daughter, Alejandra (Alex) Sanchez; and Ray Aguilar; Susan’s-on-and-off boyfriend. Tender and unflinching, each character gradually reveals their desires, wounds, and romantic entanglements in the context of their everyday lives.

The Only Ones Left (three-channel video installation*), featuring actor Jim Fletcher, weaves film noir and mafia genre references with CEO diatribes, while also exposing the conventions of the feature film climax. The three channels of video depict all plot points of the Hollywood film climax concurrently. The channels are arranged chronologically from left to right. This simultaneity draws attention to the familiarity of the subject matter and the inevitability of the violent consequences awaiting the characters.

La Mesa explores the intersections of memory, identity and queer desire. It recreates fragmented and romanticized stories of a childhood in rural Mexico as told by the artist’s father. These disjointed vignettes are interwoven with queered reenactments of scenes from popular culture. The artist casts himself in the old Mexican films and American Westerns he grew up watching with his family in California. He appears as the romantic lead opposite the male actors, including Pedro Infante, Mexican national hero and the filmmaker’s childhood crush.

With various trips to the seashore, this summer travelette becomes an inner journey through mythical realms populated by rubberized horrors. The viewer is transported into a caregiver’s nightmare where mother and son share the fruits and bones of undigested demands. These figments of fermented atrocities pile up in a barrage of bestial assaults inflamed into hellish reality by reading material of unwholesome content. Fantasy lumbers into reality with an unrelenting menu of severed ties and familial knots that tighten around the neck of he who dabbles with dementia.

An homage to the death of the soap opera, The Evil Eyes is a 1960's era story of a grandmother faced with her mortality, a mother in mid-life crisis, and a son realizing his sexuality - a dysfunctional family whose unspoken angst manifests in the latest episode of their beloved supernatural soap opera, Before Dawn.

Space Ghost compares the experiences of astronauts and prisoners, using popular depictions of space travel to illustrate the physical and existential aspects of incarceration: sensory deprivation, the perception of time as chaotic and indistinguishable, the displacement of losing face-to-face contact, and the sense of existing in a different but parallel universe with family and loved ones.

Physical comparisons such as the close living quarters, the intensity of the immediate environment, and sensory deprivation, soon give way to psychological ones: the isolation, the changing sense of time, and the experience of earth as distant, inaccessible, and desirable. The analogy extends to media representations that hold astronauts and prisoners in an inverse relationship: the super citizen vs. the super-predator. Astronauts, ceaselessly publicized, are frozen in time and memory whereas prisoners, anonymous and ignored, age without being remembered.

This is the story of two young girls who dig up a tiny woman from the back garden. They incubate her in their mouths, in their bed, they lock her in a dolls house wallpapered with pornography to make her grow up faster, feeding her through a tube in the door. When she is life-sized and ready to play they take her to the disco. A dark, comic, experimental fantasy on the implications of Little Girls Toys — with the existential melancholy of Frankenstein's monster.

"A compelling exploration of a child's inner life and logic. Impressive and distinctive."

In Xmas 1986, George Kuchar’s mother Stella has come to stay with him for the holidays. After a series of dinners with friends, Stella’s repeated discussions about her shingles and Kuchar’s ominous film-noirish narration, Kuchar rescues the morale of a dinner party gone bad thanks to an undercooked ham by presenting his hosts with a very memorable holiday gift.

– Kyle Riley

Medicine Bundle is about a bundle that was used in my family to heal my Great Great Grandfather from a smallpox epidemic and a life threatening wound from a gatling gun used against him during the Battle Of Cutknife Hill in 1885. The bundle was again used in 1918 when my Grandfather contracted the Spanish Flu as a baby. It was buried in an unmarked grave to protect it from grave robbers, but the spirit within the bundle has continued to protect our family from more modern psychological effects of colonization like depression.