CineMental brings back the short experimental program Channeling. Curated by Chicago-based artists Ethan White and Latham Zearfoss Channeling is a program of experimental moving image work that summons the ghosts of the  and the specters of the future. If we imagine the technologies of film and video as occult mediums rather than technological ones, then perhaps we can make a kind of spiritual contact with the emotional and physical realities that are often invisible (ghostly) in everyday life. In this sense, both the camera and the ghost stories it captures can serve as powerful instruments in the act of queer worldmaking. Please join us for this special screening of truly experimental and groundbreaking work by emerging queer filmmakers.

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Jochen Hick’s film portrays Tom Weise, the producer of the HustlaBall, ­an event originally created in order to encourage the acceptance of male prostitutes, but also to launch a rent boy website. After his parents split and, having lost all contact with them, this slightly-built former student of politics decides to go to New York at the beginning of the 1990s. Being virus-positive, he is obliged to live in the USA illegally. In fact, according to the law, he cannot even pay a visit to this country. At first Tom has a hard time eking out a living as an escort. Unable to earn enough money, he winds up on the streets without a roof over his head. In the end, he succeeds in helping Jeffrey Davis set up an internet page, rentboy.com, which, ten years later, becomes the largest website for escorts. Increasingly beset by health issues, loneliness and drug abuse, in 2006 Tom eventually finds someone with whom he can share his life. He and his African-American partner decide to go to Berlin.

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FIG TREES is a documentary opera about AIDS activists Tim McCaskell of Toronto and Zackie Achmat of Capetown as they fight for access to treatment drugs. Documentary interviews, speeches, press conferences and demonstrations are sampled, taken apart, and set to music, replayed this time as operatic scenes. A surreal fictional narrative is intercut with the stories of their struggles against government and the pharmaceutical industry. In this fictional world, Gertrude Stein decides to write a tragic opera about Tim and Zackie and their saint-like heroism. She kidnaps them, transports them to Niagara Falls, and forces them to sing a series of complicated avant-garde vocal compositions. However, when Zackie ends his treatment strike and starts taking his pills, Gertrude realizes that there will be no more tragedy, and thus, no more opera.

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