Frameline Presents: New Queer Cinema x Trans New Weird

In our post-90s independent film market, formal production and distribution opportunities have dwindled, while rapid technological growth has rendered media hyper-accessible and super-diffuse, setting the stage for Trans New Weird cinema. Filmmakers in this emerging movement use personal resources to make films that demand a new relationship between subject and object. By pairing Trans New Weird films with New Queer Cinema titles, this film series explores how our current generation of filmmakers are “rewilding” themselves in order to both renew queer cinema’s transgressive roots and push LGBTQ+ art forward during an unrelenting moment in history.

This emerging generation of filmmakers—primarily trans, though not exclusively—uses various formal modes to redefine the viewer’s relationship with a given film by forcing an experience of embodied identification with the film. (In contrast, queer cinema of the last two decades relies on subjective representation, which solicits sympathy and understanding.)

This phenomenon is not unique to trans cinema—in fact, the “trans” of the title could refer not only to the identity of the filmmaker, but to the viewer whose experience of their body shifts through their relationship to the film—but it is a distinctive effect of the trans filmmakers of our current moment.