NYC Arts: The Complete Guide to Art and Culture

Since Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard founded the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival in 1987, the festival has opened up the film and television industries to what have become trendy themes.

The festival has featured works by Jean Genet, Andy Warhol, Chantal Akerman, Derek Jarman, Barbara Hammer and Gus Van Sant. The festival has also become a very important venue for new and young filmmakers. Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1990) had its first New York film screening to sellout crowds at the festival. Ana Maria Simo’s How To Kill Her was premiered and later went on to win accolades at the Latino Film and Video Festival. Todd Haynes’ first film, Assassins, was shown at the festival, garnering him his first important reviews.

The festival has been especially insistent in showing and restoring the works of those who have died of AIDS. In 1988, more films chosen for The Whitney Biennial were premiered at the festival than by any other film venue in the country. In 1990 the festival was honored at the Berlin Film Festival, and in 1992 its principals were honored guests in Japan at the country’s first lesbian and gay film festival.

The festival is now known as MIX and led by Executive Director Stephen Kent Jusick. This is essentially the festival reborn to include video installation works and similar variant forms. For instance, one such event, a historic queer co-ed porn extravaganza, featured sexually explicit film and video on two screens and eighty peep show monitors at a notorious Wall Street porn palace.

• Directions: nearest subway stations: Fulton Street, Broadway-Nassau