Madsen Minax

Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance

Madsen Minax

Riot Acts is a transfabulous rockumentary representing the whole lives of transgender and gender variant musicians, through a first-hand perspective of the intersections between gender performance and stage performance. This feature-length documentary highlights issues crucial to interviewees such as songwriting, voice presentation, presenting a body or bodies on stage, audiences, venues, the idea of the spectacle, media representation, performing gender and notions about 'drag,' and the personal as political. The film culminates with the notions that identities and bodies are undeniably political, and the the trans experience isn't always one of tragedy, but one of creativity and joy.

North by Current

Madsen Minax

Filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax returns to his rural Michigan hometown following the death of his infant niece and the subsequent arrest of his brother-in-law as the culprit. Using the audio-visual approaches of essay film, first-person cinema vérité, staged actions, and decades of home movies, Madsen navigates a town steeped in opioid addiction, economic depression, and religious fervor, while using the act of filmmaking to rebuild familial bonds and reimagine justice. Posing empathy as a tool for creating a more just world, North By Current does not seek to investigate a crime, but creates a relentless portrait of an enduring pastoral family, poised to reframe and reimagine narratives about incarceration, addiction, trans embodiment, and ruralness.

No Show Girls

Madsen Minax

Originally created for installation viewing, No Show Girls documents an encounter between the artist and his friend, who performs a strip tease in silence adhering to specific instructions.

The Eddies

Madsen Minax

A death and destruction-obsessed transsexual searches for human connection in the humid Southern underground worlds of internet hook-ups and storm tunnels.​

Kairos Dirt and the Errant Vacuum

Madsen Minax

Linley Schmidt

A series of collective dreams of a transworldly being visits a myriad of characters, revealing their subconscious desires.

Two Sons and a River of Blood

Madsen Minax, Amber Bemak

Nadia Granados

​A queer woman is pregnant. The self-made family unit of two dykes and a trans man imagine a kind of erotic magic that will allow for procreation based solely on desire. Together they enact a public sex ritual to symbolize their hopefulness for multiplicity, acknowledging their cyborg bodies as technological interventions. When the queer woman miscarries her child, the three begin to build their own mythic understanding of where bodies live when they are not inside us. They create a story to trace movement of the non-body, from a hole, to a river, to a room. Images of an imaginary white room, an ikea-esque torture chamber of stillness, haunt them. As a parallel emerges between the pregnant body and the trans body, the techno-sex act becomes the key and a pyramid becomes the portal to access this other world of non-bodied existence.

Forward into the Afternoon

Madsen Minax

After a road trip to the ocean a figure communes with stray dogs to build seaside graveyard—petite and monumental sand mountains. She nourishes the sand graves with fresh breast milk.

The Source Is a Hole

Madsen Minax

A mystical voice contemplates mythology, science fiction, sexuality and death as a series of holes: through which to travel, through which to perceive, through which to accept, through which to speak.

At the River

Madsen Minax

It is the 4th of July in a small river town in middle America and the water levels are rising.

Because of Us

Madsen Minax

A voice guides us through a near-death experience. She begins by describing the experience as a sensation of viewing, similar to watching a movie. Found footage and animated skyscapes create a cosmology of connections. On-screen text is sourced from “The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps”, a 1998 book by Marshall T. Savage.

Stay With Me, the World is a Devastating Place

Madsen Minax

Angelo Madsen Minax mined 80 hours of footage, all from the year 1970, from the vaults of a Dallas TV station to construct a kinetic montage where ”the news anchors are reimagined as pseudo-divine bearers of a potential truth, transplanted from 50 years in the past and appearing before our eyes to weave a proclamation of impending doom. In poetic decree, we are told in great detail the peril of our world, yet offered no explanation of how to prevent it, nor the definitive cause. From past images, a future-image is constructed” (AMM).

My Most Handsome Monster

Madsen Minax

From vast, mystical, and historically charged landscapes, My Most Handsome Monster documents two separate BDSM scenarios as they unfold between queer sex workers and their play partners.