I Wake Up with a Flower in My Hand

In January 1996, high school sophomore outcasts, Kasten Searles and Mothra (aka Malic Amalya) aired their cable access television show "Killer Janitors" across the Burlington, Vermont area where they lived. Filming on a VHS-C camcorder, they taped their show in their high school hallways, library, and cafeteria; through culvert pipes; on bus rides home; while wondering downtown; and during weekend sleepovers. Edited on an analogue VHS system at the local cable access station, their final cut was a single, 30-minute episode, influenced by punk, alternative, and riot grrrl subcultures, daytime and late-night TV, B movies, and art class.

“I Wake Up with a Flower in my Hand” is a 25-year anniversary remix of “Killer Janitors.” Using all original footage and adding no special effects, the new cut focuses on how the best friends saw each other and understood themselves within the context of their friendship, high school, home lives, and a world beyond their small-town confinements—felt but not yet touched.

Today, Kasten Searles (www.studiokasten.com) is a painter and an Associate Professor of Graphic and Media Design at Henderson State University. She lives and works in Little Rock, Arkansas. Malic Amalya (www.malicamalya.com) is a queer experimental filmmaker and an Assistant Professor of 16mm Filmmaking at Emerson College. After 20 years away from the East Coast, he lives and works in Boston, MA.

  • Malic Amalya
    Director
  • Kasten Searles
    Collaborator
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Short
  • Runtime:
    9 minutes 3 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    January 15, 2021
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Shooting Format:
    VHS-C
  • Aspect Ratio:
    4:3
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Malic Amalya

Malic Amalya is an Assistant Professor of Experimental Media and 16mm Filmmaking at Emerson College. His films have screened at queer bars (Club SchwuZ in Berlin, Trqpiteca in Chicago, and Other Stranger at the Stud in San Francisco), museums (Portland Art Museum in Oregon, the Museum of Northwest Art in Washington State), and film festivals (Festival Les Merveilles, Paris; Ann Arbor; Light Field Film Festival, San Francisco; MIX Copenhagen; the Scottish Queer Film Festival; Cinema of the Dam’d, Amsterdam; EXiS Festival, Seoul; Onion City, Chicago; the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival; MIX NYC; and the TIE Cinema Exposition, Milwaukee & Montreal) across the world. Amalya holds an MFA in Moving Image from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an MA in History and Theory of Contemporary Art from the San Francisco Art Institute. He lives and works in Boston, MA.

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Director Statement

My films and videos attend to the emotional impact of attachment and estrangement, and the corresponding political repercussions of alliances and enmities. I am interested in how the intimate—including the body, emotions, identity, and relationships—reflects, is informed by, and has the potential to shift cultural perceptions and institutional structures. My practice is situated between formal avant-garde traditions and the oppositional subculture aesthetics of queercore.