Frontierland

Recording of the annual Christmas folklore street ritual Krampus in Austria, in which people dressed up as hairy monsters scare the wits out of the population. The accompanying metal soundtrack by The Melvins provides a curious American perspective.

An intensely filmed look at the San Fernando Valley backyard wrestling scene in the late 20th century. Driven by a pumping soundtrack created by the Melvins (Jamie’s band), it is vivid, and visceral, and a little scary. It is part of a trilogy along with the films “Spook House” and “Kranky Klaus”.

From the creators of the first queer environmental documentary feature films comes a hot new offering. The third chapter is their most epic and daring yet — fusing art, activism, and intimate storytelling in a touching journey through crisis, change, and renewal. When a firestorm rips through their redwood forest home, two artist-activists — Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle —emerge with a powerful message of love, resilience, and ecological hope, guided by a relationship with their magical peacock.

Massage the History records amateur dancers, whom Jamie found accidentally online, who freely engage the quotidian domestic scene with their own sexually suggestive movements. Unintended for an actual audience, the automatic nature of their body language evolves from an intimate spectacle into a dreamlike scenario of transcendence through onanistic desire.

A witty satire about cultural stereotyping. In a series of 1992 performances, Coco Fusco and performance co-creator Guillermo Gómez-Peña decked themselves out in primitive costumes and appeared before the public as "undiscovered AmerIndians" locked in a golden cage - an exercise in faux anthropology based on racist images of natives. Presented eight times in four different countries, these simple performances evoked various responses, the most startling being the huge numbers of people who didn't find the idea of "natives" locked in a cage objectionable. This provocative video, directed and produced by Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia, suggests that the "primitive" is nothing more than a construction of the West, and uses comic fiction to address historical truths and tragedies.

Border Brujo is a ritual-linguistic journey across the U.S./Mexico border written and performed by artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. In the guise of a cross-cultural shaman, Gómez Peña shifts into 15 different personas, each speaking a different language. The personas are symbolic of the borders between North and South, Anglo and Latino; myth and reality; legality and illegality; art and life. Border Brujo assaults and exorcises the demons of dominant cultures. He articulates fear, desire, trauma sublimation, anger and misplacement embodying ruptured and defiant communities with multilingual dexterity and humor.

Like a ghost from the future, "El Mad Mex’" narrates this hybrid-genre video, which envisions a queue of mojados who re-conquer lost Mexican territory to establish the new U.S. of Aztlan.

I talk. Therefore I am.

In a search for the mythological Cities of Cibola, a horseman finds himself in a race against another rogue seeking the valuable metals of the New Mexican desert. Spurred by the justification of moralistic 'dichos', the rival explorers come to learn about what truly brought them to this land, understanding their true identities, and finding they were only stealing from themselves.

A Thanksgiving Ritual