Unorthodocs 2021 Shorts

Among this year’s highlights is the Ohio premiere of Columbus filmmaker and Ohio State MFA student Lydia Cornett’s Party Line, a portrait of the voters waiting at the Franklin County early voting station on Morse Road during the polarized 2020 election. The adventurous Who Killed Taniya? is a speculative remake of an underground queer drag show in Dhaka, Bangladesh, that saw the lead performer murdered by an Al Qaeda attack months later. Director Rasel Ahmed, a new hire in Ohio State’s Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts, imagines five drag performers getting ready for a similar event in 2050. Cornett and Ahmed are joining us for the program; stay after the screening for a Q&A. (program approx. 75 mins., DCP)

Program lineup

This Is An Address
(Sasha Wortzel, 2019, 18 mins.)

In this meditation on community, gentrification, and erasure, the late Stonewall veteran and trans activist Sylvia Rivera takes up residency on the Hudson River piers with a group of HIV-positive New Yorkers as cranes raze vacant buildings for a new skyline.

Party Line
(Lydia Cornett, 2021, 7 mins.)

At the early voting line in Franklin County, civic duty is made public.

The Beauty President
(Whitney Skauge, 2021, 9 mins.)

In 1992, drag queen Joan Jett Blakk made a historic bid for the White House as an openly queer write-in candidate. Today, Terence Smith, the man behind the persona, reflects back on his place in gay rights history at the height of the AIDS crisis.

Slap That Bass Zoomed
(Ian Garwood, 2020, 5:30 mins.)

In the 1937 film Shall We Dance, Fred Astaire performs a virtuoso routine in a ship's engine room in front of an impressed group of African American workers. This video takes Astaire out of the picture, replacing him with an array of performers who were denied the Hollywood spotlight.

The Rifleman
(Sierra Pettengill, 2021, 18 mins.)

Through meticulously assembled archival imagery, The Rifleman reveals the roots of the modern National Rifle Association, US Border Patrol, and the gun lobby’s unyielding influence on national politics.

Who Killed Taniya?
(Rasel Ahmed, 2020, 18:30 mins.)

Who Killed Taniya? is a story of broken relationships and trauma. Five drag performers gather in a makeup room to prepare for an underground community event in Dhaka in the year 2050. While getting ready, a melodramatic unpacking of past relationships transforms the metaphorical space of pleasure and freedom into a murder fantasy.

In 2015, five Bangladeshi drag performers took part in an underground queer drag show in Dhaka. Mahbub Tonoy, the lead performer of the show, was hacked to death by an Al Qaeda attack a few months later. Who Killed Taniya? is both an imaginary remaking of this event and an experimental murder mystery set in the future Bangladesh. In this retelling, murder offers a speculative lens to interrogate public/private queer rage and homofascism.

View the complete Unorthodocs 21 lineup