A spell for queer home

short documentary, 2023

Producer, Director, Writer, Cinematographer, Editor

I arrive in a ghost town in the desert. I am here to cast a queer home spell. Braiding together embodied exploration, stories and wisdom from queer and trans folks across the country, and original spell songs, this film is a meditation and reflection on the question - what does it mean to be at home as a queer person? How do we know when we have arrived? How do we build and create queer home? How do we know in our bones that it is already happening? This film is a spell - the layers weave and stir to conjure a spell for queer home.

Director Statement: The wild landscape of Utah was the first place to hold me. Then I had to leave to find myself. After a decade in New York, where I named and settled into my queerness and transness, I returned to Utah in the summer of 2020. I was a fragile and unrooted thing. I craved queer community and a sense of belonging. In July of 2021, I was a resident artist at the Home of the Brave residency in Cisco, a ghost town in Southern Utah. I spent 3 weeks in the heat and solitude, meditating and reflecting on the questions that had been building in me about queer home. I used movement, intuition, and magic to explore these questions in my body and let the wild and sacred shapes of the ghost town guide me. I called 18 queer and trans friends across the country and asked them about queer home. This time in the desert was a cathartic deepening and release. I edited the film over the next year, weaving together my embodied exploration and the interviews, and worked with 3 queer musicians to create original spell songs to guide the journey. The process of making this film has in itself been a queer home for me. I am so moved by the collective stories and wisdom we hold. I believe, deep in my bones, that queer home is possible, radical, and happening. This film is a spell to conjure a sense of queer home for myself, my community and the collective – to know that we are enough, that we were never meant to do this alone, that queer home is possible, radical, and happening.