Mai Corkins

Madiano Marcheti’s film Madalena (2021) is a meditation on violence against trans people in rural Brazil, but it also explores the deep and lasting impacts of ecological violence. It tells of the death of a trans woman named Madalena as experienced by three people who knew her: Luziane, a club hostess whose mother sends her to pick up money from Madalena; Cristiano, the wealthy son of a soy plantation owner and a politician; and Bianca, a trans woman and close friend of Madalena’s.

Niklaus Largier discusses "figures" from the medieval contemplative tradition which resist interpretation and instead constitute a mainly sensory experience — qualities which lend them tremendous power over human imagination.

Reid Davenport’s “I Didn’t See You There” was screened at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive on November 2, 2022. Davenport shot the film entirely from his own perspective and mostly from his wheelchair. Davenport said that he wanted to show his audience “how beautiful life can look from a wheelchair.” This is certainly evident in the shots we get of Oakland at sunset, for example, or in the way that Davenport abstracts the city through carefully selected shots.

The Late Wedding — written by UC Berkeley alumnus Christopher Chen — is a play about marriages, all of the different reasons people have for entering them, and all of the ways that they conduct themselves once within them.

In 2005, women in a Mennonite colony in Bolivia began to notice evidence that they had been drugged and raped in the night. They were waking up bruised, bloodied, and in pain, but with no memory of what had happened to them. The attacks were called the work of the devil, or dismissed as the results of “wild female imagination.” It wasn’t until 2009 that it would become clear what was really happening: men of the colony were breaking into homes, drugging entire families with cow tranquilizers, and assaulting the women and girls.

Alter Theater presented Dillon Chitto’s two-man play Pueblo Revolt at Hearst Annex, which explores the Pueblo Uprising through the eyes of a gay Pueblo teen, Feem, and his older brother, Ba’homa.

In March 2023, the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies presented Sarah Ruhl’s play Eurydice, which retells the classic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in a world which feels distinctly, nostalgically, 20th century.