Smuack, Alejandra Sánchez, 2015 (24 mins)
Luisa is a woman whose life revolves around her job in a gay bar. An encounter with her 8-year old niece will force Luisa to embrace an unexpected motherhood, and to confront her sexual identity outside her close-knit gay world. While Luisa assumes the demands of mothering a child, her niece will have to endure the day-to-day microaggressions that accompany being the child of a homosexual parent. This film, sometimes brutally, and sometimes tenderly, confronts and interrogates the way we respond to situations that challenge our identities.
Casa Roshell, Camila José Donoso, 2017 (1hr 11 mins)
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, a haven for men who want to be women but cannot do so in their daily lives. Here, visitors of all ages and backgrounds come to watch, cruise or learn how to dress in drag. Though theirs is a small slice of freedom, no matter how small the utopia, the world outside can still catch up.
Speaker: Ana Grujic, Buffalo-Niagara LGBTQ History Project
The riverrun Global Film Series aspires to create a dialogue between local community and institutions of higher education in Buffalo through a selection of films that provide a better understanding of our present existence in the globalized networked world. The riverrun Global Film Series is produced by riverrun, Patrick Martin President; with support from the Burchfield Penney Art Center, the UB Department of English, the UB Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and James Agee Chair in American Culture, SUNY Distinguished Professor Bruce Jackson.
Further information about the riverrun Global Film Series at: globalfilmseries.wordpress.com