At a time when so much of our queer culture is under attack, this program celebrates the archives and the memories of our ancestors and paves a path toward our future.
Short films showing in this program:
Dr. XYZ: A Medical Drag Transthology (Dir. El Jaunts, 14 Minutes)
Dr. XYZ is a community-made trans+ healthcare training film and ethnofiction. It is an exercise in queering the public information film genre, shot in 16mm. The film weaves ethnographic healthcare accounts from Birmingham’s trans+ community with moments of drag-satire re-enactment to depict a collective vision of the UK’s healthcare system.
Director expected to be in attendance
Everywhere I Look (Dir. November Nolan, 16 Minutes)
A young trans woman travels back to places she visited as a child with her mother, reflecting on memory, loss, and grief.
Director expected to be in attendance
Lloyd Wong, Unfinished (Dir. Lesley Loksi Chan, 29 Minutes)
In the early 1990s, Lloyd Wong began to make a work based on his experiences living with AIDS in Toronto, but he died from AIDS-related illnesses before completing it. For three decades, his work-in-progress was considered "long-lost" until it resurfaced at The ArQuives. In this experimental documentary, Lesley Loksi Chan combines Lloyd Wong's footage with fragments of her research notes to reflect on what it means to inherit images from queer communities and to attempt to understand someone through multiple takes. Rough and unprocessed, this film explores the meaning of incompletion. Winner of the Teddy Award and the Golden Bear for Best Short Film at the 2025 Berlinale.
The Roaming Center for Magnetic Alternatives (Dir. Brydie O’Connor, 20 Minutes)
The Roaming Center for Magnetic Alternatives follows a mobile archiving center in a cargo trailer as it crosses the Midwest to digitize the VHS tapes of LGBTQ+ folks living in Middle America. In real-time digitizing sessions, people watch their own histories as they are being preserved, and reveal a look into queer life in the Bible Belt since the 1980s. This film takes a road trip through the past into the present, and gives us a glimpse of what an ever-expanding queer archive looks like in the future.
Director expected to be in attendance
Shelly’s Leg (Dir. Wes Hurley, 16 Minutes)
In 1970, an eccentric young stripper named Shelly Baumann loses her leg in a freak parade canon accident, then uses her settlement money to open 'Shelly's Leg' disco — one of the nation's first and most consequential openly gay spaces. Narrated by Kathleen Turner, Shelly's Leg is the latest work from Wes Hurley (Potato Dreams of America, Frameline45).