cookiebutter

THE COOKIE BUTTER TRILOGY

The Cookie Butter Trilogy is a compilation of diary films made between 2022 and 2025. 

001 Cookie Butter was my first film, 003 Dawn Chorus my most recent. On display in these films is the very substance of my education in film as I learn in practice through their creation; across the runtime, film as an otherworldly material morphs into a tool of precision. In these films are images of me through the first years of my transition; there are moments of serious reckoning, with myself, my transness and its relationship to my environment, captured bluntly on camera. In this same sense, what is documented here is my realization to filmmaking as a deeply spiritual practice; my utilization of film firstly to communicate a life lived in a state of deep dissociation, and eventually into a tool vital for self-actualization. 

In terms of material, no medium would be wasted, anything in front of me that communicated some emotion of my life would be fair use. Visually, this resulted in a collage of iPhone, camcorder, laptop camera footage enmeshed with 16mm painted film, layers of projection art, glitch art, TikToks, animated poetry, news clips and more. I always considered sound to be at the heart of this trilogy though, as each film is suffused with original music and soundscape as well as the music of my inspirations. 

My guiding principle with this project was this: only in acceptance of our past mistakes, the learning curve of filmmaking, the rough cuts and fingerprints, the embarrassments, imperfections and shames of our past, can we find our transformation in love. This transformation is now an urgent requirement –  for ourselves and the lives of our loved ones. 

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 and gasoline? A place of dysphoria, not only of mind disconnected to body but self disconnected to place? 001 Cookie Butter is the first person experience of a dissociated psyche that is 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, 002 Heresy becomes an explosive confrontation: only after facing the fear within can we make room for a transformation in love.

Screened at Translations: Seattle Trans Film Festival (2024)

and selected the “Best Experimental Short”

003 Dawn Chorus

Film gives us the ability to move above time, to survey our lives with clarity and peace. Leaving the bedroom, we find that despite political forces, Earth continues to grow (and so must we). 003 Dawn Chorus feels like the time of peace after a hurricane - given a harsh reckoning with all that there is to lose, we become new in our appreciation for the preciousness of life.

screening in 2025 at

STUFF: Seattle Trans Underground Film Festival