Queer / Nature: What is ‘natural’ anyway? at Portico Library
Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor
The Portico Library hosts an evening of artist and experimental short film curated by Jamie Allan under the banner Queer / Nature: What is ‘natural’ anyway? this month. Promising to look at ecologies and landscape through a queer lens, the six-film programme invites viewers to “move beyond categories, labels and hierarchies to imagine new ways of thinking about nature and our place within it.”
From Museum Hours director Jem Cohen’s 1991 film Drink Deep (“The piece was constructed primarily from footage I’d shot of skinnydippers at swimming holes in Georgia and rural Pennsylvania.”) to Flóra Anna Buda’s new animated short Entropia which competed in this year’s Berlinale Shorts competition, there’s breadth to the selection. As a whole though, we’re told to expect a programme that “celebrates the multitude of bodies, behaviours and relationships that exist in the natural world, questioning the lines we’ve drawn between human and nature, male and female, the natural and the unnatural.”
Films presented in this screening:
Edgar Pêra: Who is the Master Who Makes the Grass Green? (1996, 7 mins)
Jorge Jácome: Flores (2017, 26 mins)
Sadé Mica: (Various Works) (2019, 5 mins)
Maryna Makarenko: Jellyfish (2017, 23 mins)
Flóra Anna Buda: Entropia (2019, 10 mins)
Jem Cohen: Drink Deep (1991,10 mins)