Twenty-five years after Jenny Livingston's seminal documentary Paris Is Burning, which shone a light on '80s Harlem's ballroom scene, this explosive and uplifting new documentary reveals one of the subculture's contemporary descendants: the Kiki scene. Part activist movement, part artistic milieu, the Kiki community is a site of radical self-expression for young queer people of colour in New York City, whose ballroom competitions and surrogate queer families provide both creative platforms and a source of succour for individuals facing multiple forms of marginalisation. Shot over four years, the film follows seven members of the community through the difficulties of illness, homelessness and everyday discrimination, as well as the joys of spectacle, camaraderie and personal affirmation.
Aniara is the story of one of the many spaceships used for transporting Earth's population to their new home-planet Mars. But just as Aniara leaves the ruined Earth, she collides with an asteroid and is knocked off her course. Aniara's passengers slowly realize that they'll never be able to return; they will continue onwards through an empty and cold universe forever. The Swedish Nobel prize winner Harry Martinsson wrote Aniara in 1956. The novel has been translated into a number of different languages, including danish, finnish, english, russian, czech, arabic, japanese and most recently chinese. It has been staged as opera and several theatrical productions, but has never before been filmed. In Aniara's inexorable journey towards destruction there is a warning that cannot be emphasized enough. There's only one Earth. We have only one life. So, we have to take responsibility for our actions and constantly guard our environment and our humanity.