Artist Statement

2011-05-17T23:11:00.001-07:00

Gold Moon, Sharp Arrow is a 16mm collaboration between filmmakers Max Garnet and Malic Amalya, and hot, talented queers throughout the Pacific Northwest. The film is currently in post-production and will be released in the Winter of 2012.

preview of Gold Moon, Sharp Arrow

FILM DESCRIPTION:

Against a backdrop of electrocution, dominance, and scientific precision, bees nest in an abandoned refrigerator, eyelashes flutter, curtains blow in open windows, and queers congregate. Adapting Stanley Milgram's 1963 experiment on obedience to authority, Gold Moon, Sharp Arrow explores how queer communities reenact, resist, and creatively respond to oppression, coercion, and trauma.

Mel Bueno as "Teacher #5"

Gold Moon, Sharp Arrow stars queer artists, musicians, activists, wildcrafters, and academics as participants in the Milgram Experiment. Stanley Milgram originally conducted his research at Yale University under the guise of a study on the effects of learning through discipline. “Teachers” were instructed to shock the “learners” every time they failed to memorize a list of word pairs correctly. However, the teachers were the real subjects of the investigation, while the learners were actors and no shocks were actually administered. Milgram found that while the teachers were clearly uncomfortable, stressed, and acting against their ethics, they overwhelmingly followed the orders of the authority figure.

Gold Moon, Sharp Arrow cuts between a fictional enactment of the Milgram Experiment and footage of queers composed within the beauty of Pacific Northwest landscapes. While queer culture can be a radical place of healing and transformation, it also has the ability to employ the violence of dominant culture. Utilizing the language of conceptual art and avant-garde cinema, Gold Moon, Sharp Arrow straddles the political, emotional, and sexual tensions of ever-evolving queer communities.

Max Garnet ("The Learner")

POLITICAL AGENDA:
As artists, we are committed to a queer culture of loving mindfulness. We support gender and sexual self-expression and self-determination, body-positivity, and sex-positivity. We resist oppression in all forms and believe in the power of community, accountability, & transformative justice. We are working towards the re-distribution of wealth and resources; ending white supremacy and misogyny; finding alternatives to capitalism, imperialism, the military-industrial complex, & the prison-industrial complex; and Everyone having access to nutritious food, safe housing, education, and comprehensive healthcare. We made Gold Moon, Sharp Arrow with the intention of supporting queer communities to continue to resist unhealthy patterns of relating, acknowledge and challenge privilege, fight against institutional forms of oppression, and work in solidarity within larger national and global movements of social justice.

We seek accountability to our visions, politics, and communities, and we welcome conversation and questions.