Women's Film Series presents An Evening w/ Filmmaker tiona.m.

The NY LGBT Center Women's Film Series presents An Evening with Filmmaker and Artist Tiona McClodden Friday, April 20, 2012 Program 7PM Join filmmaker and artist Tiona McClodden as she discusses her work as a filmmaker, director, artist and activist in the LGBT community with Aishah Shahidah Simmons. Tiona will show excerpts of some of her most well known works and of new works not yet seen. Buy Tickets Here! https://mycenter.gaycenter.org/sslpage.aspx?pid=249 More About Tiona McClodden: Tiona McClodden aka tiona.m. is a Black lesbian filmmaker/artist. Her last film, black./womyn.: conversations with lesbians of African descent, provides a platform for Black lesbians to speak for themselves and to confront the hyper-sexualized image of the Black lesbian. black./womyn. was awarded the Audience Award for Best Documentary by the Philadelphia International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (now QFest) in 2008. Tiona continues to develop and create films on progressive topics with the hope of directing a narrative feature-length project in the near future. She is currently in production with her next feature length documentary The Untitled Black Lesbian Elder Project,a short narrative film Bumming Cigarettes, and an experimental short series called Be Alarmed: The Black Americana Epic, which is an magical realism themed meditation on the Black American experience. www.tionam.com Aisha SimmonsMore About Aishah Shahidah Simmons: Aishah Shahidah Simmons is an AfroLezfemcentric cultural worker based in Philadelphia, PA. An incest and rape survivor, she is the producer, writer, and director of the internationally acclaimed, award-winning feature documentary NO! The Rape Documentary, which unveils the reality of rape, other forms of sexual violence and healing in African-American communities. NO! also explores how rape is used as a weapon of homophobia. She is presently in post-production on Liberation from Within about the first 10-day Vipassana Meditation course, as taught by S.N. Goenka, held in India in December 2009, for people of African heritage worldwide. Her writings on cinematic activism, gender-based violence, and queer identity from an AfroLezfemcentric perspective, and the impact of the intersections of race, gender, and sexual orientation on the lives of Black women are featured in several anthologies and journals. Aishah facilitates workshops, teaches classes, and lectures extensively throughout North America and internationally. http://NOtheRapeDocumentary.org More About The Films Bumming Cigarettes Short Narrative Film Spring 2012 Bumming Cigarettes is a short film about a brief and intimate meeting between a young Black lesbian woman who is in the process of taking an HIV test and a middle aged Black Gay HIV Positive man. Coming off of the devastation of a bad breakup with a cheating girlfriend, VEE finds herself alone in her apt watching time go by, until she musters up the courage to go and take an HIV test to put her worst fears to rest. What she experiences during her trip to a local clinic is much more than she expects while sharing a cigarette with a stranger, Jimmy as she awaits her test results. This film explores tough issues that persons living with HIV/AIDS may encounter such as the loss of intimacy with loved ones while also encouraging awareness around HIV/AIDs testing and the way we treat persons living with the disease. www.bummingcigarettes.com The Untitled Black Lesbian Project {working title} Documentary (In Progress) The Untitled Black Lesbian Elder Project (UBLEP) is a feature-length documentary film highlighting interviews with black lesbian elders in their 60s, 70s and 80s from across the United States. The documentary is a collaboration between filmmaker Tiona McClodden and publisher Lisa C. Moore. UBLEP situates the elders stories within a range of historical movements, spanning the decades between the 1930s and the 1980s. Featuring 8-10 profiles of elders, UBLEP will reveal rare images of black lesbian life and history through the use of accompanying archival footage and personal ephemera. UBLEP will also bring to light a number of black lesbian underground movements, solidifying a black lesbian presence within overall American black history. http://ubleproject.tumblr.com/ Be Alarmed: The Great Black Americana Epic Experimental, 2009-2012 This experimental series is comprised of scenes cut into trailers that are a visual meditation on themes of race, class, gender, sexuality, violence, religion, mental illness, materialism, and age as it relates to the contemporary African-American community. This series is the beginning of an exploration in film genre and marketing techniques by the artist. The trailer structure of the series is something Tiona is using in order to challenge the idea of what is shown within a film trailer format in opposition to what is actually left out to encourage the viewer to desire and participate in the creation of the final film. I am taking the idea of showing only the trailer of the larger work in order to encourage the viewer to fill in the blanks in regards to the larger narrative of the idea behind the work. The presentation of the project will be a series of screenings and exhibitions of the film trailers and detailed film press kits all created by the artist. http://bealarmed.tumblr.com black./womyn.:conversations with lesbians of African descent, 2008 black./womyn.:conversations is a feature-length documentary focusing on the lives and views of lesbians of African descent from various backgrounds. The documentary is structured by interviewsconversationsthe director had with each of the women. It features candid interviews with black lesbian women discussing coming out, sexuality and religion, love and relationships, marriage, patriarchy, visibility in media, discrimination and homophobia, activism, gender identity, Black lesbian youth and elders, balancing gender/race/sexuality, and, finally, what it means to call oneself a Black lesbian today. black./womyn.:conversations is a piece that provokes honest, progressive dialogue and critical thinking among people in generaland Black lesbians in particularabout how Black lesbians are viewed and affected by society. black./womyn.:conversations features interviews with close to 50 out, Black lesbians including Poet/Author Cheryl Clarke, Filmmaker/Activist Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Poet/Author Staceyann Chin, Filmmaker Michelle Parkerson, Artist Hanifah Walidah, Hip-Hop Duo KIN, and Author Fiona Zedde. www.blackwomynfilm.com