THE HITCHHIKER PROJECT

Dir. Cuong Ngo

Canada | 2008 | 15mins | colour

Beauty, lust and betrayal lurk around every corner in a world full of glamour. The Hitchhiker Project is a short film which portrays the superficial lives of young people who live in a world of materialism.

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BREEDERS

Dir. Douglas Brook

Australia | 2009 | 8mins | colour

Set in a surreal all-gay world, Breeders follows the fight for equal rights for heterosexuals. Prime Minister Susan Sanderson is passing a law banning blended births while the Natural Births movement is determined to stop her.

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MAKE A MATE

Dir. Jennifer Jordan Day

USA | 2009 | 4mins | Beta | colour

What matters most to you when picking a partner? Would you knowingly choose a cheater, back stabber or heart breaker? Does it matter what gender your partner is? Who knows how perfect partners are created… but wouldn’t it be nice if we had some control?

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THE SHEEP AND THE RANCH HAND

Dir. Loretta Hintz

USA | 2009 | 12mins | Beta | colour

A provocative sexy romp through the dream of a woman transformed into a sheep. In love and in lust with her handsomely butch ranch hand, she delights in being her bestial self, and finds a freedom both unexpected and profoundly empowering.

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I SAW PATRICK LAST NIGHT

Dir. Borja Alvarez Ramirez

USA | 2009 | 3mins | MiniDV | black & white

Veronika falls in love with her friend and they start seeing each other. But during a short morning walk she realises her girlfriend has many doubts…

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MEETING LAURA

Dir. Felix Stienz

Germany | 2009 | 12mins | Beta | colour

Eight young people speak about their lives. Tellingly, a young woman named Laura has a special part in all their stories.

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D’UNE RIVE A L’AUTRE

Dir. Maxime Desmons

Canada | 2009 | 18mins | 35mm | colour | subtitled

A torrid lesbian affair is jeopardised as Mariell falls in love with a female co-worker; however, her devout brother demands that she marry a dear family friend to whom she’s been promised.

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THE DROWNERS

Dir. Catherine Taylor

England | 2008 | 12mins | Beta | colour

The Drowners tells the tale of two synchronised swimmers who fall for each other. Charlotte and her synchronised swimming team are putting on an innovative version of The Sleeping Beauty. Her world is thrown off-balance by the arrival of new swimmer Amanda.

THE GOLDEN PIN

Dir. Cuong Ngo

Canada | 2009 | 15mins | 35mm | colour & black & white | subtitled

Set in Canada’s multicultural milieu, Long finds himself struggling between the expectations of his Asian family and the demands of his heart. His father wants him to marry soon, but his mother hopes her son will stand up for what he believes.

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JOHN WAYNE HATED HORSES

Dir. Andrew T Betzer

USA | 2009 | 10mins | 35mm

A father and his young son share a house, a yard, and very different ideas about masculinity and appropriate uses of army toys.

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IN HIS SHOES

Dir. Ornette Spenceley

England | 2008 | 13mins | Beta | colour

After his beloved father commits suicide, Clifford and his family descend into chaos. His sister withdraws, his mum takes to her bed and Clifford decides he wants to be a girl. All he needs now is a pair of breasts.

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BOMBSHELL

Dir. Kim Farrant

Australia | 2009 | 15mins | Beta | Colour

A loaded bombshell is thrown into the laps of two Greek-Australian brothers forcing them to question their traditional beliefs and machismo identities as men. George and Yanni are ‘blokey’ in the extreme sense of the word – men’s men – but when their father is hospitalised after a brutal bashing, their family façade and the backbone of their masculinity comes crashing to the ground.

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WE – 1ST PERSON PLURAL

Dir. Vika Kirchenbauer

German | 2009 | 10mins | Beta | colour & black & white | subtitled

Poetically collaging images and sounds that she recorded with her familiy’s Super 8 archive, the filmmaker shares personal thoughts and doubts about repetitions in the context of identity, gender, political action and love.

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DEEP RED

Dir. Eddie Tapero

Israel | 2009 | 19mins | Beta | colour

Gur and Yuval will stop at nothing to make enough money for a fresh start in Berlin. As they approach their goal, the tension is growing between the two, until an unexpected event causes Gur to question both their plan and their relationship.

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MY FIRST KISS

Dir. Dermod Moore

Ireland | 2009 | 5mins | Beta | colour

Do you remember your first kiss? The experience of Tony Fitzpatrick, who was a teenager in the 1950s, is contrasted with the memories of young gay people today.

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LILY’S IMAGE

Dir. Susanne Stritch

Ireland | 2008 | 11mins | colour

Making art, a little girl finds magic in the muddle of her parents’ unusual separation.

Dir. Ang Lee

USA | 2009 | 110mins | 35mm | Colour

Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee’s new comedy stars Demetri Martin as Elliot, who inadvertently played a role in making 1969’s Woodstock Music and Arts Festival into the famed happening it was. Featuring a standout ensemble cast, and songs from a score of ’60s musical icons including The Grateful Dead, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and Country Joe and the Fish, Taking Woodstock is a joyous voyage to a moment in time when everything seemed possible. Upon hearing that a planned music and arts festival has lost its permit from the neighboring town of Wallkill, NY, Elliot calls producer Michael Lang to offer his family’s motel to the promoters and generate some much-needed business. Soon half a million people are on their way for ’3 days of Peace & Music in White Lake.’ With a little help from his friends, Elliot finds himself swept up in a generation-defining experience that would change his life -and popular culture -forever.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlLD_7k68BM

Sun 01 Nov –Sunday 08 Nov | Triskel Arts Centre at Caroline St

The 54th Corona Cork Film Festival and Triskel Arts Centre are proud to present this video installation by the artist Qasim Riza Shaheen. Stains & Stencils is of a body of work that was born out of a two year process of working with the Khusra (transgendered) community of the red light district of Lahore, Pakistan from 2005-2007. Building relationships with a group of sex workers, the artist lived and experienced their unique transgenderism. This six screen installation is a beguiling, touching and vivid experience, as the artist invites us to not just observe, but to know and encounter each individual on their terms.

“Over the period that I was in Lahore I befriended six transgendered sex workers – Gogi, KumKum, Reena, Choti, Simi and Aashi. There was so much we wanted to say through these quiet narratives whilst immersed in internal spaces. Six rooms, their occupation and me. These are six adaptations of a negotiated transient friendship that existed between us. I am a world away from theirs yet become a mediation of sort between them and you: watching them watching me re-tell their stories through my gaze. I am in their clothes, made up by them and carefully positioned and postured. As their clients, friends, pimps and madams carry on with their chores I offer you these visions and soundscapes of seduction. Listening through rooms, peering over balconies and looking out of windows – searching” – Qasim Riza Shaheen

Biography

Qasim Riza Shaheen is an artist based in Manchester. His work has been programmed widely including at The National Review of Live Art, Glasgow; Liverpool Biennial and Rohtas Gallery in Lahore, Pakistan where he has recently taught.

He is currently Artist in Residence with CityArts/ Fire Station Artist Studios in Dublin, and has an upcoming performance Queer Courtesan (Live) at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

“Stains & Stencils bears witness to an artist, a human being profoundly human, who dances his way out of a state of immobilisation, who devises strategies of play that subverts the sense of the dutiful (often to our authoring sources) that ties us to this stagnation. This elegant spectacle of selfinventing, self-dis-inventing and self-reinventing through play is a salutary response and challenge to the late enlightenment project that is still very much with us, namely, to repress subjective desires by repackaging it as the performative, as something to witness in cultured detachment that is so often a form of self-denial. Against the totalitarianism of obsolescent but fiercely enduring, mostly masculinised, attitudes, this playfulness draws from a repertory of risks that becomes the poetic language of Qasim Riza Shaheen’s work” Dr J Rangasamy F.R.S.A Chair Shisha UK