FILM &
VIDEO
Traffic in kisses
Across 2020-21, Kiki Loveday and I worked on a collaborative video that investigates the early cinema cycle of kissing films. You can watch the video artifact of our process of inquiry online at “Traffic in Kisses”.
See also our accompanying “Commentary: Something Out of Nothing—Making Traffic in Kisses” in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 63, no. 1&2 (2022): 37–61.
AN ORDINARY PERSON
Director, producer. Funded by the Screen Innovation Production Fund (partnership between Creative New Zealand and the New Zealand Film Commission); Gay Auckland Business Association. 2008, 44 minutes.
Taking as its starting point a cluster of killings in 2003-2004, An Ordinary Person unravels the infamous ‘homosexual advance defence’ to murder. Interviews with lawyers, legal academics and a journalist are inter-cut with a stylised dramatisation that tells the homophobic story - one that continues to have an underestimated cultural power - that props up the use of provocation as a defence to murder. Available to watch on YouTube.
Hermishly yours
Director, cinematographer, editor. 2003, 12 minutes.
A short portrait of intersex activist Mani Bruce Mitchell. The original blurb:
Born in 1950s rural New Zealand, Mani Bruce Mitchell’s queer life journey involves being brought up as a boy, operated on to become a girl, coming out as a lesbian, and reclaiming a lost identity as a hermaphrodite.
Mani has been an extraordinary advocate, recognised with their becoming a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2021.
Screenings:
Mardi Gras Film Festival, Sydney, 19 February—screened with Being Normal (Choi Hyun Jung 2002, Korea)
13th Annual Inside Out Lesbian & Gay Film & Video Festival, Toronto, 16 May
New Zealand Out Takes Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Auckland & Wellington, 1 & 4 June
San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, 25 June—screening as part of the “Intersex Explorations” program, with the feature First, Do No Harm: Total Patient Care for Intersex
Washington DC Reel Affirmations Film Festival, 20 October
ZwergWERK, Oldenburg, Germany, 21 November
MIX 2003: The 17th New York Experimental Lesbian and Gay Film/Video Festival, 23 November—final film in closing night program.
For feature documentaries in which Mani tells their story, see:
Assume Nothing (Kirsty MacDonald, Aotearoa New Zealand, 2009, 1h 22m)
Intersexion (Grant Lahood, Aotearoa New Zealand, 2012, 1h 18m)