When I Wallowed in a Bowl of Sunshine

The film is an attempt to reconcile my experiences of trans/queer lives, both in material reality and representation, in relation to its anticipated and sanctioned (by hetero-patriarchal and fascist systems) narrative trajectory: conclusion through and as death. Indeed, a most violent irony, to portray queer lives not on their living, multiple terms but only in their terminus: I feel frustrated and tired. Obviously, this particular narrativization of trans/queer identities in the literary and filmic spaces had its own historical moment, and everyday reality for trans/queer bodies and embodiments reeks of state-supported violence and death, but it is important to ask: what stories, what hope do we cling to now especially in the time of CoVid-19 and ever-intensifying fascism?

Ironically, what came of off this exhaustion and frustration is a film that grieves, not solely for another (often, violently represented) death, for a life ended once more, dishearteningly too soon, but for the radical feeling of grieving in solidarity. I wanted to explore how grieving feels when it is in solidarity with human and non-human agencies, with animal and botanical beings. It is also grief without end, for every day, we carry with us our dead and our histories. As we lie awake, we awaken them, in spirit.

I conjure the narrative in poetry and non-linearity, much as how I believe we experience reality materially – timelines clashing with and against each other, one moment populated by setbacks and loss, and another by moments of joy, and longing and dreams; and virtually, again our timelines albeit algorithmically personalized, as informed by the scrolling interface – one moment a meme, another a call to action. It is in this non-linear temporality, a very queer one at that, that I intend the two human characters to apparate (appear magically) for each other’s company. This is done in avoidance of misleading the viewer into a linear, therefore terminal trajectory. It is an active gesture showing the ever-thickening present and our ever-present grief.

Let us be, which is also to say, let us grieve.