MIX FEST, New York’s forum for queer experimental film, returned to Manhattan’s beloved Quad Cinema in November. Since 1987, MIX has been a petri dish for emerging cinematic talent that’s beyond the heterosexual pale. It staged a welcome return last year after a pandemic-era hiatus, though the films shown were so milquetoast that they caused me critic’s agita. But I’m a searcher at heart, so once again I crammed myself into Quad’s red seats alongside the city’s nightlife theoreticians, underground comedians, and several indier-than-indie film stars. And thank God I did! Filmmakers seized the audience with real artistic vision. The work was thematically diverse—exploring the entanglement of eroticism and exploitation in colonial legacies, the internet’s deluge of noise, familial excommunication—though the binding tie for many directors was an impulse to remix the proverbial archive.
Third World After the Sun, by Analú Laferal and Tiagx Vélez, is a latex-clad run through the jungle about colonialism, fisting, and resource extraction. It loosely follows a missionary lured by visions into the grasp of a jungle-dwelling beast and, while eschewing cumbersome exposition, it cultivates atmospheric tension through excellent sound design that made me feel like prey. The climatic fisting shots are arresting, though by jumping to an industrial setting, they break the jungle mise en scène that is so fecund with sinister eroticism. The directors are getting at the parallel between sexual and economic extraction, carnal secretions and industrial ones, but their final pose reminds me of a profile picture on a BDSM dating website.
Laurel Lawrence’s Pan & Syrinx is an arch retelling of the origins of Pan’s flute. Lawrence uses two boyish courtiers on the verge of consummation as a clever fulcrum to launch, with Old Hollywood elan, into a ballet fantasia of Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé. The twee-ness gave me pause, initially, but Lawrence is an adroit editor, has a flair for dramatic scene transformations, and is great at choosing collaborators. He’s got a sense of how to indulge tragic melodrama with real panache, and it’s wonderful to experience.
The Disco, a Portrait of Simon Eilbeck, a documentary by Alex Hetherington, has an intriguing premise: a DJ in Glasgow’s nightlife scene is going deaf. It’s a mixture of community history and filmic poetry that veers from interesting to boring to confusing. Nightclub montages synced to a ruminative score of flutes, pianos, and clarinets? Interesting! Dream poetry over abstract imagery? Boring! Interviewing a trans woman about her, to be fair, quite cogent theory of economic marginalization? Confusing! Hetherington doesn’t include any connective tissue between her and the rest of his film. It would be a statement on the club as an index of queer life if she were having a smoke between turns on the dance floor, but she’s recorded in what’s maybe a home or studio, so it comes off as an analytical Chekhov’s gun. The Disco wasn’t bad, but it would have benefited if Hetherington had excised the longueurs and tightened his focus on a compelling subject.
Molecular Delusions is a sci-fi-ish drama about a woman who kicks out her junkie boyfriend and summons, through the power of orgasm and audio equipment, a living, breathing gramophone-like sexual organ. Eventually, while she’s sleeping, a different guy appears from nowhere to “gape” it with a mysterious instrument. It’s all holes, voids, and waves. I went back and forth on it. Director Quentin L’helgoualc’h knows how to cultivate the erotic. His central character, for all her silence, is so compelling because she turns her orgasm, something fleeting and abyssal, into raw material for her art. It turns me on when a woman chooses the abyss, but L’helgoualc’h interrupts her onanistic aural odyssey when he introduces some random guy to snake-charm it instead.
Brydie O’Connor’s The Fault Line is a documentary reminiscent of Nathan Fielder’s show The Rehearsal that encapsulates O’Connor’s attempt to reconcile with her homophobic mother, who is seen only as an archival image projected behind an actress playing the maternal role. She mimes O’Connor’s mother’s movements and telegraphs resentment wrapped in layers of feminine politesse with such detestable acumen that it brings to mind Carmela Soprano. O’Connor generates both comedy and pathos by letting us in on the artistic process. The mother-actress queries O’Connor’s wife about the family background while applying mascara. She and O’Connor workshop the line delivery of a patronizing letter sent from home. She prays, in character, for God to reveal to Brydie how good life could be if only she changed her ways. Despite the metafictional staging, O’Connor is unwaveringly earnest in her attempt to salvage peace from the wreckage. I hope she found it in The Fault Line.
Hazel Katz, in her own words, has a hard time with straight chronology and a sweet tooth for YouTube conspiracy channels. Both qualities are evident, in a good way, in her documentary Who Gets to Fly, which begins with bird-strike tests and proceeds to untangle a Pynchonesque logic of American violence stretching from Nebraska to Gaza. Katz’ movie isn’t so much a mirror held up for society’s benefit as it’s the ramblings in the mirror of a tweaked-out social media poster. I know that sounds backhanded, but understand this: The tweaker is also a prophet.
The World Doesn’t End When You Do is Marlow Magdalene’s hometown “burn book” for Los Angeles, compressing sixty years of history into a ten-minute stream of cinematic effluvia. Aerial perspectives of city blocks charred by the 1992 riots are spliced together with slaughterhouse processing lines and vintage footage shot along the bucolic coastline. It’s all edited to the rhythm of Magdalene’s throbbing score, which crescendos in the distorted strands of a man testifying, evangelical style, to his deliverance from homosexuality. Quite good!
Picture Gaza or the West Bank. The image that comes to mind is apocalyptic, no doubt. Theo Panagopoulos’ The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing shows us, instead, a Mandatory Palestine lush with blooming valleys in the decades preceding before the establishment of modern Israel. Panagopoulos is using this decades-old footage to say, in part, that the place we think of as a wasteland is beautiful. He’s also saying that pastoral beauty is made into a Trojan horse for colonial devastation. Though it’s a straightforward single-screen projection, it feels unnervingly like watching a two-channel video. One channel, of course, being The Flowers, assembled from a near-forgotten archive, while the other channel is composed from the archive of Israeli atrocities seared into so many minds.
“That wig, in this room, he’s gonna melt his face off,” a former twink observed. The face belonged to Jake Brush, director of This Unremarkable Life, slinking through the crowd in Christine Baranski drag. Brush’s face didn’t melt off, but our already-gelatinous minds came a few degrees closer to qualifying as liquid assets thanks to his movie. This Unremarkable Life parades across the screen a cast of reality-TV rejects and TikTok basket cases who speak in A&E soliloquy and are addicted to hoarding images, no matter the rot it breeds in mind and body. Brush is smart to avoid moralizing about the depredations of social media and to focus instead on the novel ways it breeds insanity. Vicious, funny, and, unfortunately, so relatable!
If Brush’s film is the internet in 2025, Carter Amelia Davis’ animated Homemade Gatorade is the internet from 2009. It’s a folk-horror tale about an alienated everywoman who peddles home-brew “gatorade” on a Facebook-like marketplace and embarks upon a quest across suburbia to satisfy a particularly demanding customer. I dislike media that treats screens as dramatic devices, but Davis’ animation so well caricatures the rage-bait and utter bizarreness that is the internet. Every scene is chock full of throwaway gags playing on tabloid spam or AI chatbots or homeopathic solutions, and the whole thing climaxes with a terminally online non sequitur that achieves a gothic universality, a là Herman Melville. A full house split their sides in laughter and tears.
I didn’t like Marian Thompson-McLain’s Meat. The movie is good, though, one I’ve turned over in my mind wondering why I disliked it. She knows her themes, how to build a story around them, and they resonate with my life. All reasons to like Meat. But I don’t. I chalked it up to generational metaphors for our relationship to media—Meat’s central conceit being VHS tapes as vehicles for intercession in a traumatic past—but I realized nostalgia and media innovations are always rubbing away at or recasting in a new light every generation’s metaphors. I’ve concluded that it’s the same reason I don’t like Imogen Binnie’s novel Nevada: authorial voice.
We live in an abject time. Every headline is a dubious omen. Enmity to life abounds. But the myopic funk that bogged down so many films at last year’s MIX FEST, that withheld artists from reckoning with our moment’s perils, has been cast off. Not every film hit for me at the latest festival, but these directors know that half-measures, whether artistic or political, will avail us nothing. I’m glad to share this mortal coil with them.
Trinity Noone is a writer and publicist living in Brooklyn. Her work has been published by Dirty Magazine and MSCHF MAG. You can read her in print or on Substack at trinityhighway.substack.com.
