In the form of a "small theater of the world", a history of the world from its beginnings to our day, including the errors, the incompetence, the thirst for power, the fear, the madness, the cruelty and the commonplace, in a story of five episodes.

Basket Books | FREE

In a barbaric fantasy sci-fi trip through time, sword-and-sorcery mythology is bent, fractured, and gender-swapped by master visionary Bertrand Mandico in his third feature epic. Six lives, six eras, and six deaths mark Conann’s poetic journey through different incarnations and lesbian loves.

at Rice Cinema in Sewall 301 | FREE

Taking Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography as its starting point, academic virtuoso turned filmmaker Paul B. Preciado has fashioned the documentary, Orlando: My Political Biography, as a personal essay, historical analysis, and social manifesto.

at Brown Auditorium, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

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Taking Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography as its starting point, academic virtuoso turned filmmaker Paul B. Preciado has fashioned the documentary, Orlando: My Political Biography, as a personal essay, historical analysis, and social manifesto.

at Brown Auditorium, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Purchase Tickets Here!

Bisexual college student Danielle accidentally runs into both her sugar daddy and her ex-girlfriend while with her family at a shiva.

This event is co-presented by Houston Cinema Arts Society and Dykes the World.

Purchase Tickets Here

After working on local and national campaigns for cisgender candidates, Frankie Gonzales-Wolf makes a historic run as the first openly trans elected official in Texas. As she attempts to galvanize her district in San Antonio, Frankie navigates her own journey in relationship to her trans sisters and to her representational image in office.

Presented in collaboration with The Truth Project

Grammy-nominated director D. Smith forges her own style with a simple directive – to present the honest and unabashed stories of four Black trans sex workers in New York and Georgia, told their way. Bolstering with energy and humor from the very first scene, director D Smith allows her subjects to speak their convictions with care, intimacy, and courage.

This program will be followed by a Q&A with local sex work activism Christen Coco Valentine as well as a reception with a set by DJ Amarji.

Stay-at-home husband Haider begins a job as a backup dancer for Biba, a trans woman dancer in a burlesque-like theater run by straight women and male fantasies, forcing his working wife Mumtaz to return home to help her sister-in-law take care of the home. As Haider’s fascination with his star blossoms, his whole family must contend with the consequences of patriarchal structures in Lahore.

In one of the most striking debuts of recent memory, director Saim Sadiq delivers a staggering critique of contemporary Pakistan that constructs each character with empathy and compassion. Joyland won both the Queer Palme and Jury Prize at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival where it was the first film from Pakistan to be included in the official selection of the festival.

Stay-at-home husband Haider begins a job as a backup dancer for Biba, a trans woman dancer in a burlesque-like theater run by straight women and male fantasies, forcing his working wife Mumtaz to return home to help her sister-in-law take care of the home. As Haider’s fascination with his star blossoms, his whole family must contend with the consequences of patriarchal structures in Lahore.

In one of the most striking debuts of recent memory, director Saim Sadiq delivers a staggering critique of contemporary Pakistan that constructs each character with empathy and compassion. Joyland won both the Queer Palme and Jury Prize at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival where it was the first film from Pakistan to be included in the official selection of the festival.

Stay-at-home husband Haider begins a job as a backup dancer for Biba, a trans woman dancer in a burlesque-like theater run by straight women and male fantasies, forcing his working wife Mumtaz to return home to help her sister-in-law take care of the home. As Haider’s fascination with his star blossoms, his whole family must contend with the consequences of patriarchal structures in Lahore.

In one of the most striking debuts of recent memory, director Saim Sadiq delivers a staggering critique of contemporary Pakistan that constructs each character with empathy and compassion. Joyland won both the Queer Palme and Jury Prize at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival where it was the first film from Pakistan to be included in the official selection of the festival.

The year is 3000. Water has overtaken the land as global warning has taken full effect. Through the water, ecological systems form new technologies. Life on earth continues but through new means only imagined.

Half sisters Léa Alves da Silva and Joana Dare Furtado run an underground oil-refining operation, siphoning and selling petroleum from a commandeered segment of a pipeline and funding Joana’s run for People’s Prison Party.

With ecological and political parallels to Houston, Dry Ground Burning provides a template for the possible within the confines of a hyper-militarized oil town. Directors Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós utilize and blend nonfiction with aspirational narratives co-written by the documentary subjects themselves as they invite the audience to dream with them for better futures.

Transporting between the year 2069 and the early 21st century, Will-o-the-Wisp follows Alfred on his environmentally minded journey as he breaks from his rich aristocratic family and joins a squad of fire fighters. As the outsider and beginner of the group, he builds a budding relationship with fellow firefighter Afonso, who shows him the ropes, among other things. Through musical numbers, suggestive arts references, and a campy spirit, director João Pedro Rodrigues continues his career of boundary breaking transgressive cinema with a new environmentalist classic.

Preceded by A Wild Patience Has Taken Me Here

Vange goes out for the first time in a long while to an old lesbian haunt from her past, only to confront the changes brought by time. On her way out, a younger queer woman stops her and invites her to continue the weekend with her friends. Framed through archives of the lesbian movements in Brazil, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me Here brings together cross generational lesbians in a joyous and riotous act of queer liberation.

The Big Queer Picture Show presents Will-o-the-Wisp at Museum of Fine Arts Houston on November 11 at 9:30PM, as part of 2022 Houston Cinema Arts Festival

A year before there was Psycho III, there was Psykho III: The Musical, a 24 minute drag retelling of Hitchcock’s classic. Originally a staged musical performed in East Village’s iconic Pyramid Club, this video adaption gives a brisk and catchy camp take, complete with cardboard props, painted backdrops, and high eyebrows. Psykho III: The Musical is a snapshot of an era, bringing together queer artists from drag, video art, and performance in NYC in the mid 80’s right before the onset of the AIDS epidemic.

The screening will be followed by a performance by Kumquat, Bitchcock.

4:00 - Naomi Campbell (dir. Nicolás Videla and Camila José Donoso) - 85m

Yermén is a transgender woman who works in a call-center that provides a fortune telling service. In search of a sex reassignment she decides to try her luck in a TV show about plastic surgery, where she will meet an enigmatic immigrant who wants to have surgery to look exactly like Naomi Campbell.

Click to register for free!

7:00 - Casa Roshell (dir. Camila José Donoso) - 71m

Music plays, drinks are served and the last boundaries are suspended: those between gender; gay, straight and bi; reality and fiction. Roshell and Lili run a small transformist club in Mexico City, where men of all ages and backgrounds come to watch, cruise or learn how to dress in drag.

Click to register for free!

Food and refreshments available for purchase between shows

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4:00 - Naomi Campbell (dir. Nicolás Videla and Camila José Donoso) - 85m

Yermén es una mujer trans que, gracias a sus conocimientos esotéricos logra sobrevivir. Tiene un don para interpretar las cartas del tarot y consigue trabajo como amiga esotérica en un call center. Yermén procura de diversas formas financiar su operación de afirmación de género, que la conduce a intentar entrar a un reality-show televisivo, donde conoce a su contrincante por el cupo en el programa, una afroamericana que busca transformarse en la top model Naomi Campbell.

Reserva gratis tu asiento aquí!

7:00 - Casa Roshell (dir. Camila José Donoso) - 71m

Abunda la música y el alcohol, y las últimas barreras se suspenden. Barreras entre género; gay, hétero, bisexual; realidad y ficción. Roshell y Lili operan un pequeño club de transformistas en la Ciudad de México, donde hombres de todas las edades y experiencias vienen a mirar, ligar, o aprender a hacer drag.

Reserva gratis tu asiento aquí!

Habrá comida y bebidas a la venta entre las dos funciones.

Tickets

Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision, a sci-fi punk musical that’s a visually wondrous amalgamation of themes, ideas, and songs that Williams has explored in his work, notably his 2016 album MartyrLoserKing. Co-directed with the Rwandan-born artist and cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman, the film takes place in the hilltops of Burundi, where a group of escaped coltan miners form an anti-colonialist computer hacker collective. From their camp in an otherworldly e-waste dump, they attempt a takeover of the authoritarian regime exploiting the region's natural resources – and its people. When an intersex runaway and an escaped coltan miner find each other through cosmic forces, their connection sparks glitches within the greater divine circuitry. Set between states of being – past and present, dream and waking life, colonized and free, male and female, memory and prescience – Neptune Frost is an invigorating and empowering call to reclaim technology for progressive political ends.

Tickets

Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision, a sci-fi punk musical that’s a visually wondrous amalgamation of themes, ideas, and songs that Williams has explored in his work, notably his 2016 album MartyrLoserKing. Co-directed with the Rwandan-born artist and cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman, the film takes place in the hilltops of Burundi, where a group of escaped coltan miners form an anti-colonialist computer hacker collective. From their camp in an otherworldly e-waste dump, they attempt a takeover of the authoritarian regime exploiting the region's natural resources – and its people. When an intersex runaway and an escaped coltan miner find each other through cosmic forces, their connection sparks glitches within the greater divine circuitry. Set between states of being – past and present, dream and waking life, colonized and free, male and female, memory and prescience – Neptune Frost is an invigorating and empowering call to reclaim technology for progressive political ends.

Tickets

Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision, a sci-fi punk musical that’s a visually wondrous amalgamation of themes, ideas, and songs that Williams has explored in his work, notably his 2016 album MartyrLoserKing. Co-directed with the Rwandan-born artist and cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman, the film takes place in the hilltops of Burundi, where a group of escaped coltan miners form an anti-colonialist computer hacker collective. From their camp in an otherworldly e-waste dump, they attempt a takeover of the authoritarian regime exploiting the region's natural resources – and its people. When an intersex runaway and an escaped coltan miner find each other through cosmic forces, their connection sparks glitches within the greater divine circuitry. Set between states of being – past and present, dream and waking life, colonized and free, male and female, memory and prescience – Neptune Frost is an invigorating and empowering call to reclaim technology for progressive political ends.

presented in collaboration with

without architecture, there would be no Stonewall; without architecture, there would be no "brick"

This film will be screened on 16mm at 18fps with a live score by Nudo and Desvelada. Admission is free.

“It was by making LACRIMA CHRISTI that I realized at all levels, the fact of belonging to two cultures, of carrying two opposite bloods in my veins.”

Teo Hernandez’s film is a portrait of a fractured self clutching onto a shadow world of half-remembered myths. Fusing biblical tropes with psychedelic camerawork, Lacrima Christi rubs the mundane and mythological worlds together until they breakdown into hypnotic pulsations of light and movement. These pulsations build into a frenetic energy that dilates the mind’s eye to induce a trance-like state.

Hernandez embraced states of delirium at his screenings, improvising music and obsessively altering the projector speed to further disorient the audience. Unapologetically mobile, impermanent, and mutable Hernández offers a site to think about Queerness in relation to an unfixed place.

Nudo is a psychic handshake/brain trust between Joaquin Tenorio and Eric Hernandez. Hailing from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuaha Mexico and Eagle Pass, Texas USA, respectively. Their music was initially birthed from daisy-chained 4 tracks, countless youtube pages being run through MaxMSP, hours of talking about border slang, cholo memes, niche Norteño also-rans, industrial and state mass manipulation, and the bittersweet reality of growing up on either side of the notorious TexMex border.

Desvelada is a DJ, visual artist, and occasional producer with a background in choir originally from Mexico City. She has recently relocated to NYC after growing up in Texas and finishing a degree in film. The focus of her music is to invoke nostalgic ideations, and her sets reflect her attitude of intentional disorder and are genre blenders. Collaborating with Paris-based producer Sprælle with the track “Quieto” where she recalls a memory of an incident where a man punched a window and bled throughout her house. Desvelada has exhibited her visual work and guest mixes with the Montréal based radio station N10.as.

presented on 35mm film with Houston Cinema Arts Society and Goethe Pop-Up

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Fashion designer Petra von Kant's lavish life in her opulent apartment is thrown into an obsessive tizzy when she is introduced to a young woman, Sidonie, who immediately catches her eye. The two embark on a sexual game of cat and mouse, a chess game of desire in which Petra cannot escape.Based on the director’s own obsession with a young actor and limited to a single apartment over the course of a few days, Fassbinder brings a heightened sense of fashion, design, and melodrama to a queer classic.

This screening honors the legacy of Rainer Werner Fassbinder on the 40th anniversary of his passing on June 10, 1982.

In post-WWII Germany, homosexuality is still criminalized under paragraph 175, leading Hans to arrest time and time again. His constant through these imprisonments is Viktor, a convicted murderer. These two form an unlikely relationship in a time and place where love and desire are fraught.

Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2021, Director Sebastian Meise explores an uncomfortable entanglement of queerness, surveillance, and criminality through a disquieting period of history often unrecognized. Franz Rogowski delivers a career highlight performance as a man whose life is destined for confinement that nothing else seems possible.

In post-WWII Germany, homosexuality is still criminalized under paragraph 175, leading Hans to arrest time and time again. His constant through these imprisonments is Viktor, a convicted murderer. These two form an unlikely relationship in a time and place where love and desire are fraught.

Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2021, Director Sebastian Meise explores an uncomfortable entanglement of queerness, surveillance, and criminality through a disquieting period of history often unrecognized. Franz Rogowski delivers a career highlight performance as a man whose life is destined for confinement that nothing else seems possible.

This program is followed by the discussion, Mapping Queer Houston, featuring Byron Canady, Stephanie Saint Sanchez, and Marcus Pontello, who examine queer surveillance in Montrose and discuss notions/narratives of safety in the historic queer neighborhood as it has changed through the decades.

Benedetta, a young woman who grew up in the nunnery, oversees the introduction of a new woman, Bartolomea, to the convent, after escaping an abusive situation. Feelings begin to develop between the two women as Benedetta begins to see visions of Jesus. Questions of heresy arise as the power structures of the convent shift in the wake of both divine intervention and the rise of the plague.

Loosely based on the “true story” and adapted from the novel Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy by former Rice University professor and department chair Judith C. Butler, Verhoeven takes extreme liberties to one of the first recorded stories of a same sex relationships with a campy and engrossing moral tale anchored by fantastic performances by Virginie Efira and Charlotte Rampling.

This program is accompanied by an outside projection highlighting the history of the nunsploitation genre from the 1970’s to the present.