WELCOME TO THIS HOUSE, a feature documentary film on the homes and loves of poet Elizabeth Bishop, is about life in the shadows, and the anxiety of art making without full lesbian disclosure. Hammer filmed in Bishop’s best loved homes in the U.S., Canada, and Brazil, believing that buildings and landscapes bear cultural memories. Interviews with poets, friends, and scholars provide missing documents of numerous female lovers. Bishop’s intimate poems and the creative music composition by Joan La Barbara bring the poet into our lives with new facts and unexpected details

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If you’ve ever found yourself on the outside looking in, then you are probably familiar with the coping strategy of acquiring the identity of a movie character in order to gain legibility within the situation. The central character of Jenni Olson’s mesmerizing essay film is a gender dysphoric, Midwestern tomboy who is drawn to borrowing masculine personas from Hollywood characters as a mode of understanding how to deal with being drawn to unavailable women. A fascinating and unlikely reinvention story, The Royal Road simultaneously explores cinematic spiritual channeling, the conquest and colonization of Mexico and the American Southwest, fading historical Californian urban landscapes, and the passions found in butch identity to achieve an achingly beautiful and poetic defense of remembering. Probing roads from El Camino Real, to the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, to the road right outside the front door, Olson crafts a deeply intelligent and transcending observation of the human condition that reaches for redemption in the embrace of history, nostalgia, mindfulness, and sheer beauty. If you give yourself over to it, it will crack you wide open.

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From Rhode Island to Seattle, Sandra embarks on a cross-country road trip to share in the world of her former son, now Annabelle, recently transitioned as a woman. As Sandra learns from Annabelle’s mentor Shannon, an older transgender woman fully at home in her identity, and shares the joy of Annabelle’s’ new relationship, we see in these 3 women’s yearnings and struggles a reflection of the way we all perceive identity, family, and belonging.

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