Offering utopic feminist visions and poignant popular culture remixes, the work of Lorri Millan and Shawna Dempsey is a call to action. Oscillating between performance and film, Millan and Dempsey transform the cinema into a politicized viewing space, one in which the patriarchal constraints of traditional cinematic expression and reception are deconstructed. Rendering the invisible, visible, their work brings to light experiences and identities—always present but, by virtue of neglect or exclusion, obscured and pathologized: lesbian life, love, and friendship; women’s bodies and desires, their appetites, their contradictions, their power. This collection offers a selection Millan and Dempsey’s films—new historical accounts, social interventions, and cultural visions—that span their 25 year collaboration and engagement with Winnipeg’s tradition of independent cinema. Artists and activists, mentors and visionaries, Millan and Dempsey’s contributions to this tradition, and the community in which it resides, cannot be overstated.
The DVD features the following work available with curatorial essay by Catherine Bryan.
Good Citizen: Betty Baker (1996)
A Day in The Life of A Bull-Dyke (1995)
Vigilance (2015)
Homogeneity (1998)
We’re Talking Vulva (1990)
Calamity (2001)
Archaeology and You (2003)
Lesbian National Parks and Services: A Force of Nature (2002)
Super (2008)