Film Maudit 2.0 Starts Online & Live @ Highways! Wednesday, January 12, through January 23, 2022

FILM MAUDIT 2.0 
FESTIVAL 
starts January 12 through January 23, 2022

This year’s third edition is the biggest ever, encompassing both physical & virtual events, including 16 Feature Films, 10 Shorts Programs and our yearly Behold! Queer Film + Performance Series. Though hailing from over 25 countries worldwide in a range of different subjects and styles, there is a connecting spirit to all of the outré works in Film Maudit 2.0, each selected to engage a different facet of the cinematic imagination. 

TICKETS FOR BOTH THE PHYSICAL + VIRTUAL COMPONENTS OF THE FESTIVAL ARE NOW ON SALE HERE!!! Individual tickets are $5; live performances are $10; all-access pass is $65.

GO DIRECTLY TO THE VIRTUAL FESTIVAL, CLICK HERE.***

3rd Edition Returns with Live and Virtual Screenings
Featuring Shorts and Feature Premieres, 
Live Music Scores and Special Programs

The Interactive website  @ www.filmmaudit.org
The third edition of Film Maudit 2.0, a showcase and celebration of new and some classic outré, unusual and startling films takes places January 12-23, 2022 at Highways, the legendary L.A. Performance Space and Gallery. This year, Film Maudit 2.0 features over 100 works of cinema from 23 countries including films rarely if ever, seen in festivals: works addressing socio-political issues and taboo subject matter that challenges conventional artistic assumptions and sexual mores. The hybrid festival will present both live screenings @Highways, as well virtual, online screenings of 12 feature films, 10 shorts programs, specially commissioned sections, and a collection of new scores to silent films starring the iconic Lon Chaney by artists who reflect the diversity of Los Angeles. Included in the festival are a range of narrative, documentary and experimental films that are deliberately bold, extreme, confrontational, and unusual.

Film Maudit 2.0 is inspired by French avant-garde filmmaker and writer Jean Cocteau who created the original Festival du Film Maudit (literally “cursed films”) in 1949 aiming to celebrate overlooked, shocking and experimental films.
Feature Films making L.A. premieres:
Jacinto (Javi Camino, Spain)
Masking Threshold(Johannes Grenzfurthner, Austria/USA)
Directamente Para Video (Straight to VHS) (Emilio Silva Torres, Uruguay)
Hotel Poseidon (Stef Lernous, Belgium)
LandLocked (Paul Owen, USA)
Timekeepers of Eternity (Aristotelis Maragkos, Greece)
Alien on Stage  (Lucy Harvey, Danielle Kummer, United Kingdom)
Midnight in a Perfect World (Dodo Dayao, Philippines)
Peppergrass (Steven Garbas, Chantelle Han, Canada)
Post Mortem (Péter Bergendy, Hungary)

Shorts Programs include:
Future Present, Future Past (sci-fi-ish work)
Truth, Abstracted (experimental documentaries)
Life is Weird (surreal dark comedies & dramedies)
Treasure Cove of Animation (diverse range of animated films)
Routine Explosion
(surreal & genre-based works around ‘routines’ and breaking out of them)
Poetic Pictorialism
(experimental & narrative works based around language and image)
Child’s Play (dark, genre-based works based around children/youths)
‘In the Depths (The World Over)’
(horror works based around the darkest parts of humanity)
Horrific Tears of Laughter (horror ‘comedy’)
Absolutely (No-Question About It) NSFW (self-explanatory, 18+ only)
Special program: Behold! Queer Film and Performance Series:
features multiple feature and shorts film and video programs that showcase works from and about the LGBTQ+ and Latinx communities in curated categories.

Transgressive Desire: Body Work from Queer Women, Trans, Nonbinary, and Intersex Short Filmmakers
Curated by Gina Young
What links these five short films is not just the inherently transgressive nature of queer women, trans, nonbinary and intersex people owning their unique desires and enacting their most radical fantasies, but also that all the filmmakers are performance artists in one form or another, who bring their comfort confronting a live audience to your screen as they turn the lens on their vulnerable and powerful bodies. 

Queer(ing) Time
Curated by Dino Dinco & Juan Fernandez
An array of short and feature-length films, largely from California-based queer and trans filmmakers and artists of color, that each in its own manner offers a glimpse into the cultural climate of its release date along with a distinct vision of the past and/or the future. The most recently made film in our program is Leo Herrera’s Queer Futurist The FATHERS Project (2020) in which Herrera intercuts both shot and re-purposed imagery through a hybrid genre he calls sci-fi documentary to imagine a queer utopia, if not jouissance, by reframing the impact of HIV/AIDS on queer history and queer future. The Dope Elf Films

Six short films by Gawdafful National Theater made between December 2020 and March 2021 during the global pandemic, and shot largely by the actors themselves with a little help through the windows of their homes. The company has spent the last ten years working together on theatrical installation performances tipped toward issues of American power and violence. A message in a bottle from their halted touring production, The Dope Elf, a collection of six plays by Asher Hartman about molecular white supremacy and patriarchy evidenced in the minutiae of daily life, these films peer into the psyches of beings who are both human and non-human, violent and banal, creatures drawn from an American fascination with European myth and magic, whose love of violence and self-harm remain at the core of their shifting identities. Encountering ConstruX From Rick Castro to Gio Black Peter
There is only the encounter with one’s own projections.  Encounter the construx of our filmmakers and perhaps find yourself in their works. Three short videos depicting the aesthetics, artists, talents, sights & sounds of Rick Castro’s legendary fetish Hollywood art Gallery~Antebellum.  World artist Gio Black Peter breaths life unfettered by shame and unencumbered by fleeting notions of morality in his new short-film Sushi, a glimpse into a day with a family of prestigious art collectors and descendants of the Swine Burger fortune who meet to celebrate sex, drugs, and violence with candor.
 
d-ConstruX
Emerging artists break it down and start again. It’s a journey through six-short videos by two emerging artists. Jose Tinoco explores desire and connection through the endless bombardment of internet content while Izzy Bravo’s queer, de-tribed indigeneity merges a raunchy avante garde style that reflects emotional complex interactions through body, mind, and spirit.
 
Breathe
2 Short Films at the intersexion of dance and spoken word as a safe space.
féi hernandez‘ Our Lungs, Your Wings is a meditative contemplation of a new safe world and foreseeable future that is defined by and for trans and queer Black, Indigenous, People of Color.

Taso Papadakis & Kevin Williamson’s Safe and Sound explores queer love, pleasure, and safety in times of pain. The film is based on a dance-theater performance for queer dancers to resist structures of oppression and violence through cathartic movements and tender care.+++
“There is a connecting spirit to all of the works in Film Maudit 2.0, each selected to engage a different facet of the cinematic imagination,” says Festival Artistic Director Patrick Kennelly. “These radical “cinema-sations” are guaranteed to not just entertain, but to challenge the mind and shock the senses.