On Oct. 1, the Brown Arts Institute will kick off its latest film festival with the 2019 movie, “Cats.”
Although “Cats” drew widespread ridicule on its release, BAI director Sydney Skybetter believes the film belongs in the same group as critically acclaimed motion pictures like “Black Swan,” “Ex Machina” and “Arrival.” Along with four other movies, these films will be showcased at BAI’s Trash Camp Super Queer What Even Are Human Bodies Vaguely Dancerly Sci-Fi Film Festival, set to take place from Oct. 1 until Nov. 12.
The Trash Camp festival marks the first iteration of Rigorously Curated, a film festival created by Skybetter and fellow choreographer Raja Feather Kelly. The films showcased in this year’s festival are all “films that put the CULT in culture,” Kelly told The Herald.
Skybetter said that while the mix of films may be surprising to some, the choices are intentional.
“Art doesn’t have to be good to be great,” he said. To Skybetter, these films are “things that are dumb but beautiful, smart and despicable. These eight films form a constellation that speaks to what it means to be an artist right now.”
Skybetter’s background in choreography and surveillance studies shaped the way he approached the movie lineup. “We live in a moment defined by surveillance, emerging tech and a discomfort with the bodies of others, even when those bodies are our own digital doppelgängers,” he said.
For Skybetter, the films all center around the same question — what it means to see and be seen.
Kelly, who has worked with Skybetter for years, said that the festival explores the concept of the body. “Choreography trains you to read bodies — not just as performers, but as storytellers,” he said.
“When curating, I look for moments where the body becomes a site of transformation or tension,” Kelly added. “Whether it’s the duality in ‘Black Swan,’ the constructed identities in ‘Ex Machina’ or the gender fluidity in ‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch,’ these films use the body to explore complex themes,” Kelly said.
For Kelly, the guiding question of the festival is simple: “Do we make culture or does culture make us?”
But the films cannot be neatly categorized and don’t always appear in a typical film festival lineup. “I don’t love all of these movies — though many I do — and I am excited to engage with them equally and excavate culture,” Kelly said.
He also hopes the screenings invite self-reflection for audiences. “How do we engage with films that are both critically acclaimed and widely ridiculed?” Kelly asked.
Kelly said his curatorial partnership with Skybetter came naturally. “We have many of the same interests and also really disparate interests,” he said. “And yet we come back, always, to the site of the body and what it can do and communicate.”
For Skybetter, the festival is a way to show what the BAI can offer students. “We’re taking these movies maybe a little more seriously than they deserve while having fun along the way,” he said.
For the “Cats” screening, the BAI’s Creative Arts and Technology Spaces will host a workshop where students can design digital cat faces of themselves, according to Skybetter. Other screenings will feature collaborations with the LGBTQIA+ Thinking Initiative and a residency with John Cameron Mitchell, the creator of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”
Peter Chenot, the BAI’s director of marketing and communications, said this fall’s festival is “just the beginning.” The rest of the semester will see multiple interdisciplinary events that aim to engage the entire student body, he added.
Skybetter hopes audiences leave with a new way of looking at these films — and at culture itself. “What happens when we take ‘Cats’ as seriously as we take Chekhov?” he asked. “These aren’t just guilty pleasures. They reveal truths about contemporary anxieties around bodies, technology and authenticity.”
By the end of the festival he hopes viewers may identify links between the films, including how the vampires in “Twilight” connect to the obsession with transformation in “Black Swan” or how AI in “Ex Machina” relates to the exploration of performance in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”
“The boundaries between high and low culture are more porous and more political than we often acknowledge,” Skybetter said.
Summer Shi is a senior staff writer and illustrator for the Brown Daily Herald. She is from Dublin, California and is currently studying design engineering and philosophy.
