Co-presented by MIX NYC, producer of the NY Queer Experimental Film Festival.

The latest film from acclaimed San Francisco-based filmmaker, writer, curator, and LGBT film historian Jenni Olson, The Royal Road is a beautifully structured, multi-faceted essay film that offers up a primer on Junipero Serra’s Spanish colonization of California and the Mexican American War alongside intimate reflections on nostalgia, butch identity, the quest for unattainable women, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo – all against a contemplative backdrop of 16mm urban California landscapes, and featuring a voiceover cameo by Tony Kushner. Freely mixing personal and historical meditations, and allowing the two to amplify each other without necessarily making the connections explicit, The Royal Road is a film of ideas that is also a pleasure to look at and listen to.

Co-presented by MIX NYC, producer of the NY Queer Experimental Film Festival.

The latest film from acclaimed San Francisco-based filmmaker, writer, curator, and LGBT film historian Jenni Olson, The Royal Road is a beautifully structured, multi-faceted essay film that offers up a primer on Junipero Serra’s Spanish colonization of California and the Mexican American War alongside intimate reflections on nostalgia, butch identity, the quest for unattainable women, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo – all against a contemplative backdrop of 16mm urban California landscapes, and featuring a voiceover cameo by Tony Kushner. Freely mixing personal and historical meditations, and allowing the two to amplify each other without necessarily making the connections explicit, The Royal Road is a film of ideas that is also a pleasure to look at and listen to.

“Xander Marro (American b. 1975) has been living the good life in the feminist sub-underground for too many years to count on her long bony fingers. She draws pictures (usually narrative), makes movies (usually not narrative), produces plays with elaborate sets and costumes (usually narrative, but confusing), and then makes stuff like quilts and dioramas (probably narrative?). Her work is often about spiritual relationships to the material stuff of this world. Co-founder of the Dirt Palace in 2000 AD (feminist cupcake-encrusted netherworld located along the dioxin filled banks of the Woonasquatucket River, which is to say in Providence, RI, USA). Her studio (and heart) is there still.” –X.M.