cookiebutter

COOKIE BUTTER TRILOGY

A trilogy of diary films chronicling America’s growing violence towards the trans community, coinciding simultaneously with my journey transitioning between 2022 and 2024.

With no line between thought and craft, these films capture my psyche as it developed through stages of pain to peace, filmmaking itself becoming a fundamentally transformative experience. These films taught me what they were as they were crafted, and by the end my relationship to my body, my world, and film itself had been radically changed.

The heart of this trilogy is sound, and includes original electronic music and soundscape. Visually, materials include improvisationally shot iPhone and camcorder footage, animated poetry, concert footage of Kim Gordon and Eartheater, 16mm painted film, TikTok screengrabs and news clips, and microscopy shot alongside Allie Sells.

001 Cookie Butter

What does the world look like when your body feels like nothing more than an extension of a landscape of hate, constructed of concrete, steel and gasoline? 001 Cookie Butter is the first person experience of a dissociated psyche, both comforted and paralyzed by overwhelming fear.

Screenings (2023):

Translations: Seattle Trans Film Festival

Fragments of Self: A Cape Fear Cinema Showcase

FlowILM at the Cameron Art Museum

installed as an ambient loop at FlowILM

002 Heresy

Alone in our bedrooms we face the horrors of a political media machine designed to bring psychological torture and physical death to the trans community. Drenched in warm colors and brutal soundscapes, the film becomes an explosive transformation beyond of victimhood.

Screened at Translations: Seattle Trans Film Festival

and was selected the “Best Experimental Short” by the jury (2024)

003 Dawn Chorus

(in progress)

Film gives us the ability to move above time, to survey our lives with clarity and peace. Leaving the bedroom, 003 Dawn Chorus finds that despite the political forces, the Earth continues to grow (and so must we). We can learn to move through space together, with a lived understanding of the perfection inside every image and every moment.