Sickness and Strength: The Golem as Diva in Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau’s What Do Stones Smell Like in the Forest?
“How bad must it be to be pain / instead of pain adjacent?” So asks the chorus in Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau’s 19-minute, two-channel video opera What Do Stones Smell Like in the Forest? This half-interested, half-mocking query sets the stage for a unique and radically affirming exploration of chronic illness. Stones, first shown […]
The F(ill)maker: On Making Movies While Chronically Ill
It dawned on me before sitting down to write this piece that maybe I am not at all qualified to write about disability, illness and filmmaking, as I haven’t been paying very close attention to the community of disabled or chronically ill filmmakers. In order to rectify this situation, or at least to take a […]
Failure and Queer Community in Can You Ever Forgive Me?
In 1961, journalist and activist Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a groundbreaking work arguing that urban spaces flourish when meaningful human relationships are structurally nurtured.[i] In 1999, novelist and critic Samuel R. Delany revitalized Jacobs’ ideas on interconnectedness through his essay collection Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, which […]
Who We’re Watching: Sandi Tan
There’s a moment in the 2018 documentary Shirkers when narrator and filmmaker Sandi Tan says, “We were no longer magical kids who made a movie. We were just kids.” She’s referring to what happened after her friend and mentor, an American filmmaking instructor named Georges Cardona, disappeared in 1992, taking her movie with him. Tan, […]