Karissa Hahn, Before The Portrait, 2012, 2:12 min.

Crawling through the piles of shit, tits scraping bottom, cuts and bruises, you come to a realization.

This isn’t the end. The feelings won’t last. You will have to carry onward and there will be so. much. more. pain.

But, right now, it doesn’t matter. You’re a fly AF mermaid.

Thanks again to Echo Park Film Center and Kate Lain. If I am ever asked back, my follow up program will be THE PLEASURES OF BEING A GHOST.

…because aren’t we all waiting for something good.

Goodbye Forever 🙂

Thirza Cuthand, Through the Looking Glass, 1999, 14 min.

First off, congratulations! You have endured the teenage years – that tenuous time where survival questionable, especially if you are one of those people without a set place. So, maybe I should say CONGRATS are in order to all those folks.

(I never said you came out unscathed, but you’re here.)

Moving past the foundational years (which seem like a cruel joke because people are constantly pulling the ground out from under your feet) you are welcomed to a regimented world where you are told to fall in line.

Definitions abound and you are hailed to picks sides to define yourself in various ways. RED or WHITE. BLACK or BLUE.

Dedicated to those who unabashedly refuse to erase their multi-faceted subjects, let’s all extend a giant middle finger to binaries and those forcing us to assimilate ourselves on their terms.

Michael Lucid, Dirty Girls, 2000, 17:57 min.

If the great and ominous cosmos doesn’t illicit terror in you, I have one word that will – teenagers.

The ghosts of horny, bursting, writhing, sprouting, half-baked humans haunt our existence from birth. Our future lies in front, but it is decidedly full of precocious, pimpled pricks trying to break people down.

Not only should the horror of becoming one strike fear in us all, but nothing is more of an affront to emerging identities than being trapped in the anarchy of adolescence, a place where people are scrutinizing our fragile selves and describing us with phrases like – “the girl who didn’t take a shower since Kurt Cobain died.”

From the mouths of babes…

#1 – Born Under a Bad Sign

Kelly Kaczynski, Itinerant Horoscopes, 2011, 12:38 min.

Celestial bodes have been plotting against us since FOREVER. Though we can’t separate ourselves from the social, political and cultural circumstances that help shape who we are, it would be remiss to dismiss the truest determinant of our lives – what sign we are born under.

We are nothing if not fools under a system, put in place by astrological circumstances, and our identities unfold before us in the horoscope sections of local newspapers, magazine and internet articles.

There’s nothing like a fucking star telling you who you are…