Years have always worked on a September to September cycle for me. The passing of time, in the form of a calendar circle, always felt renewed, or like it had the chance to be renewed, at the end of a Summer. This is to say that the timing of MUSCLEFEST, from September 3-6, felt both climactic and divine.
Elizabeth Purchell and Sadie Meadow, co-partners of Muscle Distribution first pitched the idea of this festival to me and Jillian Frank, with whom I co-directed Drinking and Driving (2026), back in late Spring. Their idea was based on how multiple film titles from their catalog had not yet had the chance to premiere in New York City, and how we had the power to fill in an empty gap in the city’s programming with something new. Purchell had taken an interest in my first film, Honeycomb (2022), last fall, and then quickly picked up Drinking and Driving as well. Her dedication to giving both films the best release possible has astonished me. She has a deep care and love for the films she chooses to distribute, and I have been held by the company in a way I had never experienced before. Quite a few of the films in Muscle’s catalog are interconnected by the artists involved in them and, as the event came together, I realized how it could end up feeling like a reunion of sorts. At one point, Meadow referred to it as the circus coming to town. That felt right.
The whole thing—the festival, summertime, and this moment in my life—really started on September 2 (MUSCLEFEST Eve), when Hazel Norwood, of Castration Movie fame, organized drinks at a bar I know and like in my neighborhood in New York. I’m new, and when I know how to get somewhere here without looking at my phone it makes me feel good. I had just arrived back from Toronto two days before and brought a bad head cold with me. It made everything feel fuzzy and I couldn’t tell if things were awkward between these dear friends of mine or if I had forgotten how to speak. Yet the night turned sparkly and hopeful when Lex Walton, who also stars in Castration Movie, received the news that Pitchfork had included her album, Ultimate Love Forever, in their latest edition of their “Best New Music” column. Witnessing something like that feels one of a kind—I walked back dizzy, like the world felt bigger and I had forgotten my directions home.
We’d all planned to meet up at a restaurant in Chinatown the next day, and I got there early because I’d read the group text wrong. But as I was sitting and waiting on the curb, Milo Talwani, star of both Dog Movie (2023) and Puppygirl (2025), walked by. Suddenly, I felt like I had made the right mistake by arriving so early. We grabbed a beer, I drank half of mine and told her that in the wake of Muscle Distribution re-releasing Honeycomb, I had been overwhelmed by my new theory of bad girls and what it meant to cheat and be honest about it.
After dinner, we walked to the Roxy for the New York premiere of Louise Weard’s Castration Movie Chapter iii.ii Junior Ghosts - Premorphic Drift; A fragmentary Passage (2026). I lead the cast in the role of Izzy, a young woman who becomes fixated on preventing her partner, Tiffany (Henri Gillespi), from transitioning. In the past, I’ve had a hard time watching myself in the film, but this time I did, and I only felt that for a little bit. I sat on the stairs for one of the funnier moments, and then felt stuck on the ground as we moved into the final fight between my character and Tiffany. The Roxy has been important to me since last year, when I sat in for a screening of Castration Movie: Pt. 1 (2024). There's something about those movies and their audience—they feel like a moving wheel, and then you’re just spinning. The room and the staff at the Roxy allow that feeling of freedom to be fully realized in a way I haven’t experienced at any other cinema before.
After Castration Movie Chapter iii.ii, I watched Jason Waters’s Crocodile Dose (2026), which Louise had told me played “as if one of the Superbad boys had an extremely active Snapchat.” During the film, I got to sit next to the star, Chase Mackay, which was fun because he got to hear every single audible gasp I took while watching. The movie was great and everyone leaving the theater had their energy restored by Jason Waters, Graham Cox, and Chase Mackay’s combined artistry.
Nancy Whiskey Pub is always around the corner from the Roxy, and it never feels like a complete visit with Louise until we have spent the drunken hours discussing how we will finally finish the world that is Castration Movie. I slept in until 3 p.m. the following day and eventually made my way back to Manhattan to catch the new restoration of Doris Wishman’s Dildo Heaven (2002), which was followed by Anaïs Alias and Avery Jaye’s A Night with Alterotics (2026). Dildo Heaven is an early aughts, shot-on-video sexploitation comedy that had its world premiere at the New York Underground Film Festival just months before Wishman passed. That these two films played side-by-side felt really beautiful; Dildo Heaven left me pretty nauseated by heterosexual intercourse, and the films by the Alterotics girls made me consider letting gay sex rule my entire creative reign. Alias and Jaye run a cruising and screening collective in Chicago, and had a really special set of films to present. Their friendship glows on screen, and there is something both therapeutic and dissonant to their films that I admire. The next day, Aoife Clements, from Castration Movie, arrived and we spent the afternoon coloring in the hearts of Drinking and Driving beer koozies red instead of white. Aoife and I talked through the inner workings of relationships around us while we coloured. It’s these quieter moments that become the center of these chaotic events for me.
Night three featured a secret screening of Scott King’s Treasure Island (1999), a film about two guys who become psychosexually obsessive over a young man's corpse. There was a unanimous mystery to the film that continued beyond its reveal. The audience left in total mutual bewilderment and I went home early that night, which had been predecided by myself. I needed to make myself dinner and force myself to sit down so I had the chance to regain energy for the New York premiere of my own film the next day.
The ends of things are hard for me. It feels like I spend so much time anticipating something, then it moves over me without warning, and then I become very present at the end. The presence mostly comes from the underlying question, "Is this over?”
We started the evening off with Henry Hanson’s Dog Movie and Puppygirl. I’d seen both films back at Frameline in San Francisco earlier this Summer, and they had attached themselves to my heart and would not leave. Dog Movie was introduced by Jessi Gaston, who stars in the film, as a movie about “what happens when you let users into your life,” while Puppygirl is a half-make-believe documentary about a personal odyssey of sexual understanding. It’s the clear deepness of the relationships within both of the film’s workings that struck me. Plus, they make me laugh, and they’ve made the people who’ve sat beside me laugh, as if we were all in on the same inside joke.
Drinking and Driving played last. Jillian Frank and I were all sketchy in the lead up to the presentation. We bumbled through an introduction in which I forgot to publicly thank Liz, Sadie, and the Roxy for everything the weekend brought—which was a lot. It’s truly such a venture to put something like this together, and they did it so beautifully. Thank you.
There wasn’t a seat left for me in the beyond-sold-out crowd for Drinking and Driving, so Dillion Friend, Roxy’s very involved projectionist, invited us to watch the film from the booth—something I had never done before. Watching the audience through the glass like that made me feel removed in the right way. It felt like watching a movie about a bunch of people making movies. If I let myself take a step back, I think that’s kind of what this whole thing would feel like. My life feels built and encompassed by independent artists’ working really hard to ask their questions. MUSCLEFEST gave them an outlet, and my heart felt full and somewhat foreign to me in the observation of it all.
Our movie closes, and due to the projection booth’s heavy glass I can’t hear the applause. I guess that’s how I know it’s not quite over.
Avalon Fast and Jillian Frank’s Drinking and Driving premiered at the Los Angeles Festival of Movies in April and continues to screen around the world.
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