FRESH KILL (1994)
dir. Shu Lea Cheang
Shareen Lightfoot and Claire Mayakovsky raise their daughter Honey near the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island in New York City. Shareen works as a salvager recovering refuse from the landfill, while Claire works as a waitress at a sushi restaurant. The city is heavily contaminated with pollution that adversely affects local animals and food; Claire brings home contaminated fish from the restaurant that is eaten by Honey, who begins glowing green and then vanishes. Shareen and Claire discover that the multinational GX Corporation is responsible for the pollution and Honey's disappearance, and become involved in an effort to hack and expose the company with sushi chef/hacker Jiannbin Lui, and poet/dishwasher Miguel Flores. (link in title)
queer short cuts is a biweekly newsletter where i share queer & trans short film recommendations. i’m featuring some of my favorite films on tumblr because why not
israel | 21 minutes | 2020 | narrative short film
audio in hebrew & arabic; subtitles available in english & german
polygraph | بوليجراف, written and directed by samira saraya, never lets you forget about the inherently unequal power dynamic between yasmine (played by saraya herself), a palestinian arab nurse living in tel aviv, and her israeli lover or (hadas yaron), who is an intelligence officer in the israeli army – nor about the way that yasmine’s life is surrounded by israeli occupation and suppression, even just when driving her girlfriend to work. when yasmine’s sister jehan (fidaa zidan) comes to visit from the occupied west bank, the dinner yasmine hosts to introduce them becomes a site of tension around or’s participation in upholding israeli apartheid.
- deepa's full review, including content notes at the end
watch as part of the collection upon her lips: butterflies at vimeo on demand or several other platforms, or with a subscription on the criterion channel
“The Barbara Stanwyck vehicle Ladies They Talk About (1933) seemed, on the surface, to be in the vein of tough Warner exposés and crime dramas, with Stanwyck as a bank robber doing time at the women’s wing of San Quentin. However, after an opening sequence so realistically recreating a robbery that censors feared it could be a how-to-primer, the movie lapsed into Midnight Romance fantasy. Instead of grim prison conditions, Stanwyck’s jail time resembled a stay at a health spa, with glamorous inmates, beauty treatments on demand, and a laid-back air. The only grittier touches (besides Stanwyck’s ingrained Brooklyn moxie) were incidental, such as the inmates yelling ‘New fish!’ when Stanwyck first arrives, and a black inmate talking back ferociously to an imperious white prisoner. Another jailbird in this glossy clink is a muscular woman with close-cropped hair and a cigar clamped in her mouth. ’She likes to wrestle!’ Like the other inmates, this one is spared the dreariness of prison grooming, being permitted instead to wear the standard Hollywood Dyke getup of a tailored outfit and little bowtie. ‘Mmmmm . . . . hmmmm!’ air. Later, less expectedly, we see this butch prisoner’s femme other half. The camera pans across the cells to take in after-hours vignettes that never occurred in any real-life jail, including a slumber party in lingerie, an inmate cuddling a Pekingese, and the butch woman doing an exhibition round of calisthenics. Wearing a pair of man’s pajamas and with the cigar still in her mouth, she goes through her paces to the delight of a frilly girlfriend sitting in the bed next to her. ‘You’re just always exercising!’ the femme marvels. Ladies They Talk About received numerous complaints through the Studio Relations Committee about the robbery scene, about the violence and discussion of prostitution. Only in strict Ohio, however, did the lesbianism cause any problem; Roth’s ‘wrestle’ line was cut. So it remained over the succeeding decades, when women’s prison movies were one of the few places onscreen where lesbians were allowed to exist openly. This one is one of the first."
-From Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall by Richard Barrios
D.E.B.S. (2004)
dir. Angela Robinson
Recruited by the U.S. government for their unique ability to lie, cheat and fight, Amy, Max, Janet and Dominique join an underground academy of secret agents known only as D.E.B.S. These crime fighting hotties set out to save the world and keep their lipstick perfectly applied while doing so. Now the girls must combine their skills for their most important mission- to capture vexing vixen Lucy Diamond, the deadliest criminal the world has ever known. When D.E.B.S. star player, Amy, falls for Lucy, chaos erupts and the D.E.B.S. loyalty is put to the test.
(link in title)