Queer films at the 2025 Slamdance Film Festival
Down to its name, the Slamdance film festival was conceived as the punk cousin to Sundance. As the media increasingly writes about seven-figure deals and Oscar prospects for Sundance’s films (or their absence, this year), Slamdance has long been a showcase for micro-budget work. At this point, it’s distancing itself from the other festival. While … Read More
Down to its name, the Slamdance film festival was conceived as the punk cousin to Sundance. As the media increasingly writes about seven-figure deals and Oscar prospects for Sundance’s films (or their absence, this year), Slamdance has long been a showcase for micro-budget work. At this point, it’s distancing itself from the other festival. While Sundance is searching for a new location, away from Park City, Utah (where both festivals used to take place), Slamdance has already relocated to Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the festival may be the only chance for the films it showcases to be seen widely, so the online component has become an essential part of it.
Yun Xie’s “Under the Burning Sun” pictures a future all but emptied of life. A title places the setting “sometime, somewhere else,” but its sci-fi dystopia is an all-too-believable projection of our present. Two things have happened to hollow out the world: water is so rare that it’s a precious, expensive commodity and abortion has been criminalized. It risks becoming the kind of progressive fantasy dismissed as “#resistance kitsch,” but the rough edges enhance the resemblance to present-day America.
Mowanza (Stephanie Pardi) seeks to terminate her pregnancy following a sexual assault. When she requests an abortion from a doctor, he throws her out. She travels through a parched desert. Her attraction to an abused woman whom she helps is one of the few bits of respite. She dreams of escaping to another country, where abortion is legal. If this sounds like a set-up for a lecture, it’s not: “Under the Burning Sun” is actually rather quiet and contemplative, despite violent moments. Yun works around her small budget, letting sound effects stand in for a car accident and explosion. Although some of the performances are amateurish, cinematographer Tianyi Wang brings out the bleak nature of the setting. While it can’t help evoking similar forms of science fiction, “Under the Burning Sun” puts a specifically queer, feminist spin on its vision.
Carolina Perelman’s “Confessions Chin-Chin” simulates the effect of spending a night out, overhearing other people’s conversations. While most of the Spanish director’s film takes place on a Saturday at the Madrid bar Cazador, it incorporates other kinds of material: a film-within-the-film documentary about a painter, a rehearsal for a dance performance.
Without a central character, “Confessions Chin-Chin” hops from person to person, just as the handheld camera roves around, coming uncomfortably close to the actors. Sitting at the bar, a group of friends discuss contraception, porn, and monogamy. Around the corner, two queer actors, Vicente and Lolo, talk about their frustrations. A woman argues with her ex-boyfriend, who takes a masochistic relish in the tension. At home, two women pass an egg’s yolk between their mouths, serving as foreplay. (It’s preoccupied with sex, although not at all explicit: an artist acts out a medical exam that turned into sex with his doctor upon his clay sculpture of an ass.)
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“American Theater” documents gay director Brian Clowdus responding to his own “cancelation."Nicholas Clark[/caption]
Perelman claims inspiration from Shirley Clarke’s 1967 “Portrait of Jason,” in which she and her husband interviewed a Black gay man, and says she wants to inspire reflection on performativity. (The documentary director keeps telling her subject that he doesn’t seem to be acting naturally, and indeed he comes across like a stereotype of a brash, larger-than-life artist.) Perelman and co-writer Samuel based their script on extensive interviews with the cast, as well as confessions Perelman has heard throughout her life. The result strives for intimacy, while keeping it at a distance. The fragments don’t add up to a satisfying whole, but the constant hovering and short attention span are deliberate. “Confessions Chin-Chin” is overly disjointed, jumping from style to style in a manner that suggests a series of shorts put together.
Uel Renteria’s short, “Stellacast Transmission Pt. 1 Subconscious Eyes,” takes place on colorful sets daubed in paint, as though it were a messed-up kid’s show made by someone having a bad drug experience. The extremely stylized makeup, costumes and production design even made me wonder briefly it were animation, but Renteria dips into surrealism to explore the mind of Ian (Nick Candido). He’s a mentally ill man in the grips of a new drug called Seven, which causes paranoid hallucinations. The film’s confidence in its own unusual style and treatment of addiction through sci-fi conceits are impressive. Renteria has a bright future ahead.
Lola Rocknrolla’s documentary “The Big Johnson” is a loud, rowdy wake. It’s as big as its subject, the 6’ 6” singer and drag queen Dean Johnson. Beyond Johnson himself, it looks back to a New York before Giuliani decimated our nightlife. Johnson, who came to the city as a college student in 1979, embraced rock music as an expression of queerness, playing campy glam with a touch of the B-52’s, New York Dolls and Blondie. He established two different club nights, Rock’n’Roll Fag Bar and Homo Core. The music industry did not treat him kindly. After his song “F**k You” became a minor hit, Island Records signed him and then dropped him because they didn’t want to market a gay drag queen. This wasn’t the first setback he suffered, but according to the film, he kept bouncing back from them. Yet his death in 2006, during a period when he made a living through sex work, remains a mystery, a possible murder committed by one of his clients. More than one of the film’s interview subjects suggests that the Washington, DC police didn’t care enough to fully investigate it because he was a queer sex worker. Despite this ending, “The Big Johnson” celebrating Johnson’s life rather than treating him as a tragic martyr.
The Salem witch trials have been a malleable political metaphor: Arthur Miller used them in “The Crucible” to speak about McCarthyism. “American Theater” documents gay director Brian Clowdus responding to his own “cancelation” for allegations of racist behavior, groping and sexually harassing an actor and creating unsafe working conditions in Serenbe Playhouse, the theater he founded in an Atlanta suburb. (This article provides a thorough account of the reasons Clowdus was forced out.)
Gathering a right-wing cast and crew, he mounts “The Salem Experience,” a 2021 production with the same methods as his previous stagings: the audience follows the cast around through a series of outdoors sets. Directors Nicholas Clark and Dylan Frederick never interview Clowdus or anyone else face to face. They edited their film down from hours of footage with little explicit editorializing. Clowdus’ martyr complex certainly comes across, but so does the passion he puts into his work and his ability to create a community, however temporary, around his plays.
However, the film suffers from some evasions. Clowdus is also an aspiring politician, running for a state representative seat in Florida as a MAGA redneck who loves both Broadway musicals and the NRA, but this important element of his life is reduced to a sidebar. More troublingly, the structure of “American Theater” captures his work in the moment, so he alone gets to speak about the accusations of racism leveled against him, with no input from the directors and actors who’ve criticized him and Serenbe Playhouse publicly to do so. The takeaway from “American Theater” may end up being an ideological Rohrshach test, not least the question of Clowdus’ sincerity.
Films available to stream online at slamdancechannel.com from Feb. 24th-March 7th
“American Theater” documents gay director Brian Clowdus responding to his own “cancelation."Nicholas Clark[/caption]
Perelman claims inspiration from Shirley Clarke’s 1967 “Portrait of Jason,” in which she and her husband interviewed a Black gay man, and says she wants to inspire reflection on performativity. (The documentary director keeps telling her subject that he doesn’t seem to be acting naturally, and indeed he comes across like a stereotype of a brash, larger-than-life artist.) Perelman and co-writer Samuel based their script on extensive interviews with the cast, as well as confessions Perelman has heard throughout her life. The result strives for intimacy, while keeping it at a distance. The fragments don’t add up to a satisfying whole, but the constant hovering and short attention span are deliberate. “Confessions Chin-Chin” is overly disjointed, jumping from style to style in a manner that suggests a series of shorts put together.
Uel Renteria’s short, “Stellacast Transmission Pt. 1 Subconscious Eyes,” takes place on colorful sets daubed in paint, as though it were a messed-up kid’s show made by someone having a bad drug experience. The extremely stylized makeup, costumes and production design even made me wonder briefly it were animation, but Renteria dips into surrealism to explore the mind of Ian (Nick Candido). He’s a mentally ill man in the grips of a new drug called Seven, which causes paranoid hallucinations. The film’s confidence in its own unusual style and treatment of addiction through sci-fi conceits are impressive. Renteria has a bright future ahead.
Lola Rocknrolla’s documentary “The Big Johnson” is a loud, rowdy wake. It’s as big as its subject, the 6’ 6” singer and drag queen Dean Johnson. Beyond Johnson himself, it looks back to a New York before Giuliani decimated our nightlife. Johnson, who came to the city as a college student in 1979, embraced rock music as an expression of queerness, playing campy glam with a touch of the B-52’s, New York Dolls and Blondie. He established two different club nights, Rock’n’Roll Fag Bar and Homo Core. The music industry did not treat him kindly. After his song “F**k You” became a minor hit, Island Records signed him and then dropped him because they didn’t want to market a gay drag queen. This wasn’t the first setback he suffered, but according to the film, he kept bouncing back from them. Yet his death in 2006, during a period when he made a living through sex work, remains a mystery, a possible murder committed by one of his clients. More than one of the film’s interview subjects suggests that the Washington, DC police didn’t care enough to fully investigate it because he was a queer sex worker. Despite this ending, “The Big Johnson” celebrating Johnson’s life rather than treating him as a tragic martyr.
The Salem witch trials have been a malleable political metaphor: Arthur Miller used them in “The Crucible” to speak about McCarthyism. “American Theater” documents gay director Brian Clowdus responding to his own “cancelation” for allegations of racist behavior, groping and sexually harassing an actor and creating unsafe working conditions in Serenbe Playhouse, the theater he founded in an Atlanta suburb. (This article provides a thorough account of the reasons Clowdus was forced out.)
Gathering a right-wing cast and crew, he mounts “The Salem Experience,” a 2021 production with the same methods as his previous stagings: the audience follows the cast around through a series of outdoors sets. Directors Nicholas Clark and Dylan Frederick never interview Clowdus or anyone else face to face. They edited their film down from hours of footage with little explicit editorializing. Clowdus’ martyr complex certainly comes across, but so does the passion he puts into his work and his ability to create a community, however temporary, around his plays.
However, the film suffers from some evasions. Clowdus is also an aspiring politician, running for a state representative seat in Florida as a MAGA redneck who loves both Broadway musicals and the NRA, but this important element of his life is reduced to a sidebar. More troublingly, the structure of “American Theater” captures his work in the moment, so he alone gets to speak about the accusations of racism leveled against him, with no input from the directors and actors who’ve criticized him and Serenbe Playhouse publicly to do so. The takeaway from “American Theater” may end up being an ideological Rohrshach test, not least the question of Clowdus’ sincerity.
Films available to stream online at slamdancechannel.com from Feb. 24th-March 7th What's Your Reaction?
