Christopher’s Chronicles, Christopher Lee & Elise Hurwitz, US, 1996, 30 min.
Trappings of Transhood, Christopher Lee & Elise Hurwitz, US, 1997, 27 min.
This program highlights the documentary work of late transgender filmmaker and activist Christopher Lee. Lee’s first film, Christopher’s Chronicles, a record of the artist’s transition from female to male was among the very first films made by and about a transgender man of color and premiered at the 1997 Frameline Festival. Through his use of interviews, video collage, and music (including transgender artist Chloe Dzubilo’s band, Transisters), Lee’s second feature documentary film, Trappings of Transhood focuses on the stories and lived experiences of a multiracial group of transmen who candidly share their experiences of negotiating issues of race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and the medical industry within their process of transition. Trappings of Transhood was the first known featurelength work to document the experiences of transmen, and has been screened internationally. This will be both the first NYC screening of Lee’s two documentary films since his death in 2012 and within an NYC festival setting since 1997.
1997 Frameline Film Festival
1997 MIX New York Queer Experimental Film Festival
1997 Seattle Lesbian & Gay Film Festival
1999 Northwest Transgender Film Festival
2000 Lesben Film Festival Berlin
Followed by a postscreening conversation with curator Leeroy Kun Young Kang and scholar and public health research scientist Sel J. Hwahng. This screening is part of Dirty Looks: On Location.
Dirty Looks: On Location is a series of queer intervention in New York City spaces. Over the course of July, artist film and video will appear in these queer social spaces and former sites of queer sociality (like shuttered bars, bathhouses, and former meeting zones). A new piece, a different setting on each night of July. The summer in New York is hot, sticky and social. Installing moving image works around the city in bars, centers and “haunted” venues allows for the free flow of viewers to engage and celebrate with work, in evening events that commemorate contemporary movingimage production and its precedents in queer culture.
Christopher Lee (1964-2012) was responsible for making the world’s first feature film starring FTM people of color and the first ever FTM trans pornographic movies. Lee and Alex Austin co-founded Trannyfest in 1997, now known as the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival. In addition to being a filmmaker, Lee was a leading activist of the San Francisco Bay Area transgender community and served as the world’s first FTM Grand Marshal of San Francisco’s LGBT Pride in 2002. Lee’s work has screened at various underground, queer, and experimental film festivals and universities both nationally and internationally. Elise Hurwitz ?worked in film and video through 2003 and then changed careers to work in consumer electronics as an Engineering Program Manager. She lives in Berkeley, California with her husband and 15 year old daughter who is a fierce gender rights advocate and activist.
Elise Hurwitz worked in film and video through 2003 and then changed careers to work in consumer electronics as an Engineering Program Manager. She lives in Berkeley, California with her husband and 15 year old daughter who is a fierce gender rights advocate and activist.
Leeroy Kun Young Kang is an archivist, visual artist, and independent film curator based in Brooklyn, NY. Leeroy received a BA in Studio Art from UC Santa Barbara with an emphasis in experimental video and holds a Master of Library Science from CUNY. He is a guest curator for Dirty Looks: On Location 2015 and co-curator of the LGBTQ Shorts Program for the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival.
Sel J. Hwahng, Ph.D. is a Co-Investigator at the Baron Edmond de Rothschild Chemical Dependency Institute, Mount Sinai Beth Israel and has received numerous grants, awards,and fellowships from such organizations/institutions as the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the National Institutes of Health, the American Public Health Association, the International AIDS Society, and the Association for Women in Psychology. Publications include over 25 sole-, first-, and co-authored articles and book chapters in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes as well as first-author on multiple public health reports. Sel has taught as faculty at Columbia University, New York University, Parsons School of Design, and other institutions and is Program Chair of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Caucus of the American Public Health Association. Sel has also curated film/video programs on LGBTQ people of color and transmasculine identities and communities for both the New York LGBT Film Festival (NewFest) and the New York Queer Experimental Film Festival (Mix NYC), and nationally toured a lecture and film/video clip show called “Queer Colored Girls.”
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