Movies: Michelle Handelman

A lonely and elderly widower struggles to come to terms with the loss of his wife and the circumstances surrounding her death. When he visits her grave, he encounters a little girl who shows him the path to healing and fills him with hope....

A diverse program of films and videos by various artists who challenge conventional representations of gender, family and sexuality, curated by Tom Kalin for Drift Distribution....

This docudrama presents the history of the telephone, updated and told from the point of view of a character who uses the screen as both a connection to intimacy and a condom for safe sex....

A documentary that introduces FIT Hives, a student-run organization whose mission is to educate the FIT community about the importance of bees to the environment, the use of bee-derived resources in the industries related to the majors at FIT and its...

Michelle Handelman: These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves includes the artist’s new video trilogy, The Pandemic Series (2020-2021). This series is comprised of These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves (The Lockdown); Solitude is an Artifact of the Struggl...

Solitude is an Artifact of the Struggle Against Oppression (2020) is a continuation of the project These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves which I started at the beginning of the pandemic. It recontextualizes characters from my previous works into hypno...

An attic, a giant sewing needle and an anti-gravity fairy tale of sibling rivalry. Three sisters fight over who gets the biggest phallus in this post-feminist animation-infused playground by media artist Michelle Handelman. If Hans Christian Anderson...

A woman imitating a man, imitating himself. Using the cut-up techniques of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, I edited this film using experimental out-takes and guided purely by intuition. The film sat around for a year without a soundtrack. Then...

"Dorian, a cinematic perfume" is based on Oscar Wilde’s 19th century novel "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and its themes of decadence, narcissism and the meaning of art. I have interpreted the story and it’s queer undertones by casting Dorian as a youn...

Candyland is one of a series of studio performances from the project "Cannibal Garden" that examines the constructed identity as it mutates through digital space. Using artifice as costume, mining sci-fi, anime and horror films for psychological inte...

From pushy bottoms to macho femmes, Bloodsisters is an A–Z documentary guide that takes an in-depth look at the San Francisco Leatherdyke scene during the mid-nineties....

"Irma Vep, The Last Breath" is a multichannel video project based on Musidora, the French silent film actress, and the character she is best known for, Irma Vep from the film Les Vampires (dir. Louis Feuillade,1915). It's a piece about living in the ...

Michelle Handelman’s new work, THESE UNRULY AND UNGOVERNABLE SELVES (2020), recontextualizes characters from her previous works into a hypnotic visual essay about the transfiguring of interiority during periods of isolation and fear. It takes as its...

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Riffing off of Nauman's early performance tapes, Handelman chants this negative affirmation into a song of personal endearment. Simultaneously self-reflexive, self-conscious, meditative and pathetically funny....

Working from the premise that there is no such thing as safe sex, this film is designed as an arcane storybook with each sexual act being contained within a 100 ft.-roll of film. A structural film with content, each roll contains layers of sexual ill...