Series Site
January 17–February 23, 2025
Last year’s wildly popular Masc series returns with a fresh new installment. The majority of last year’s screenings were sell-out hits, so get your tickets now for the singular opportunity to experience such rarely seen AFAB (assigned-female-at-birth) masc movies from around the world as the cult-status Japanese boys school melodrama Summer Vacation 1999, the Brazilian transmasc poet biopic Vera, and Paul B. Preciado’s innovative must-see hybrid feature documentary Orlando, My Political Biography. More recent US gems include Cheryl Dunye’s long-unavailable women’s prison drama Stranger Inside (with Dunye in person for a post-screening conversation); Dee Rees’s Pariah, a pioneering feature about a Black butch teen in Brooklyn; and a whimsical 1980s teen comedy about a girl who becomes a boy, Something Special (Willy/Milly). As a bonus non-masc treat, the series concludes with an extremely rare screening of the 1951 Mexican girls school melodrama Muchachas de uniforme.
There are several interconnected animating ideas behind this series: First, as is true for all historically marginalized groups, it is vitally important for the LGBTQ+ community to see ourselves represented on screen. Second, it is an even more amazing thing to see these representations together as a community. And lastly, Masc reflects the solidarity and common bonds of butches, trans men, and gender nonconforming AFAB folks, which is so important right now. In this era of unprecedented attacks on the basic rights and lives of LGBTQ+ people, especially trans and gender nonconforming people, we all need—and deserve—to experience the joy of cinema.
—Jenni Olson, Guest Curator