This content was published: December 4, 2023. Phone numbers, email addresses, and other information may have changed.
Connection: Isolation, a film by G. Chesler
Southeast Gallery
A documentary film and act of witnessing what has been lost, gained, and revealed to trans and gender variant people in the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Date: Friday, April 26, 5-9pm
- Screening begins at 6pm, Q&A discussion to follow
- Location: Portland Community College, CLIMB Center, 1626 SE Water Avenue, Portland, Oregon 97214
In this event, viewers will watch the film as a work in progress and are invited to participate in a discussion about building a documentary with and for trans and queer people. Viewers will be invited to reflect on their own pandemic experiences and consider community, health, and connection in this era.
Masks will be required and provided.
In an airborne pandemic when separation, isolation, and self-sufficiency became the punishing norm, many trans and genderqueer people face the COVID-19 era differently. G. Chesler’s new documentary feature presents eight portraits of trans, postgender, and genderqueer people who share their experiences of cultivating, sustaining, and joining communities in this pandemic. These trans community creators center experiences of Asian American people facing violent racism as the pandemic began in late 2019, Black Americans rising in opposition to white supremacist police-state violence in mid-2020, and the exclusion many people who are disabled feel from a society that –despite grave and massive loss – still refuses to habitually protect itself at large.
G. Chesler’s film highlights how COVID-19 and Long COVID have impacted trans people disproportionally. This is not a new story for a community that faces violent loss, less access to health care, criminalization, and whose freedoms are legislatively restricted by transphobes forcefully. But it is one that must be heard and understood. Trans and queer people have built a culture undergirded by mutual aid. This became a model for resilience and care in the pandemic for those who listened.
May this film be a conduit for that history.
May it also foster space and reflection by trans, genderqueer, nonbinary, and queer viewers of their own experiences in this time.
About the director
G. directs and produces this film as a transgender nonbinary disabled queer person, primarily for other queer and trans folx. They work with a crew of artists across the US who are all queer, genderqueer, nonbinary, and predominantly trans. Their approach echoes G.’s documentary feature “Period: The End of Menstruation,” which wove a similar portrait-based tapestry. G.’s 20+ year career of filmmaking around themes of the body, gender, health, and racial justice informs their choices in making this documentary through a practice centering on consent, sustainability, and health. instagram.com/g6_pix
