Tom Kalin
2021Tom Kalin (born 1962) is an award-winning screenwriter, film director, producer, and professor of experimental film at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee.
His debut feature, Swoon, is considered an integral part of the New Queer Cinema. In addition to his feature work, Kalin has created a number of short films, many of which are collected in the compilations Behold Goliath or The Boy With the Filthy Laugh, Third Known Nest and Tom Kalin Videoworks: Volume 2.
Much of Kalin's work touches on issues of homosexuality (both modern-day and historical) and AIDS. He was a member of two AIDS direct action groups, ACT UP and Gran Fury. His work has won much critical acclaim and garnered a number of awards and nominations, including honors from the Berlin International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca Film Fest and a number of gay and lesbian film festivals. Kalin won the Gotham Awards Open Palm Award (for Swoon) and has been nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards.
Kalin's last project was Savage Grace, Savage Grace tells the story of the 1972 Barbara Daly Baekeland murder case and stars Julianne Moore as Baekeland.
Tom Kalin has taught graduate-level filmmaking classes at Columbia University School of the Arts, and is currently lecturing at the European Graduate School in Switzerland.
He is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Tom Kalin, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Nation
Tom Kalin
Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art and The American Center in Paris as part of their international Trans Voices project, Nation flashes contradictory formulations of language, politics, and medicine across a sharp and close screen. Blurring geography with the body's landscape, Nation reminds us that our bodies, like land, have been shaped by history into zones to be charted, conquered, divided, or made whole. "Think globally act locally," in one dense minute.
Nation
They Are Lost to Vision Altogether
Tom Kalin
They Are Lost to Vision Altogether acts as erotic retaliation on legislation such as the Supreme Court sodomy ruling — declaring the private bedroom as open target for the State — or the Helms Amendment — the U.S government's refusal to fund explicit AIDS prevention information for gay men, lesbians and IV drug users. An attempt to reclaim eroticism and to address the contradictions of sexuality and romance in the face of a monolithic and culturally compulsory heterosexuality, They Are Lost To Vision altogether finds queer history where it can and invents the rest.
They Are Lost to Vision Altogether
Swoon
Tom Kalin
Daniel Schlachet, Craig Chester
Teenagers Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb share a dangerous sexual bond and an amoral outlook on life. They spend afternoons breaking into storefronts and engaging in petty crimes, until the calculating Nathan ups the ante by kidnapping, and murdering, a young boy.
Swoon
Savage Grace
Tom Kalin
Julianne Moore, Stephen Dillane
This examination of a famous scandal from the 1970s explores the relationship between Barbara Baekeland and her only son, Antony. Barbara, a lonely social climber unhappily married to the wealthy but remote plastics heir Brooks Baekeland, dotes on Antony, who is homosexual. As Barbara tries to "cure" Antony of his sexuality -- sometimes by seducing him herself -- the groundwork is laid for a murderous tragedy.
Savage Grace
30/30 Vision: Three Decades of Strand Releasing
Randy Barbato, João Pedro Rodrigues
Maria Schneider, Drew Droege
Over 30 filmmakers and friends of Strand Releasing have come together to honor the company’s indelible contribution to independent cinema over the past thirty years. The participating filmmakers have each created a short film for the project, all shot on iPhones.
30/30 Vision: Three Decades of Strand Releasing
Third Known Nest
Tom Kalin
Third Known Nest is a collection of nine short works completed approximately one per year from 1991 to 1999. Interwoven with nine quotations from some of my favorite writers, the eighteen short entries in Third Known Nest function as an intimate visual diary—fractured pictures from my day-to-day life. I carried a Super-8 camera with me whenever and wherever I traveled, and also at home—just running errands or in the garden. I shot nearly a hundred fifty-foot reels of film.
Third Known Nest
Sublime Objective, Mirror Mirror
Tom Kalin
Director Tom Kalin uses the elegant dynamism of parkour as a motif for aspiration in Mirror Mirror's Sublime Objective music video. The lyrics speak to striving for a goal, while the music suggests a transcendent state: a relationship that Kalin explores with the use of Shaker-inspired movement, bubbles, and imagery of rainbows and light halos. Sublime Objective is available on Mirror Mirror's LP, Interiors.
Sublime Objective, Mirror Mirror
finally destroy us
Tom Kalin
Kalin's short video works function both as visual poems and as alternative music videos. With their astute conjunctions of image, music and text, these tapes respond to issues of sexuality and human interaction in the 1990s, more than a decade into the AIDS crisis.
finally destroy us
