The Owls

Directed by Cheryl Dunye | 66 minutes | 15+ | Australian Premiere |

2:15pm Saturday, 28 June | static vision HQ

Buy Tickets ($17.50/$15) | Buy Day Pass ($65/$55)

TEN YEARS AGO, THEY WERE THE HOTTEST LESBIAN BAND ON THE SCENE … NOW, THEY’RE ON THE VERGE OF LOSING EVERYTHING

In this rarely screened experimental thriller, four middle-aged lesbians - including writer/director Cheryl Dunye (The Watermelon Woman) and Guinevere Turner (writer of American Psycho) - accidentally kill a younger girl and decide to cover it up. But their crime comes back to haunt them when an unexpected stranger appears in their midst to stir up sexual and generational tensions.

Shot and edited like 2000s reality TV on cheap digital cameras for $22,000 as part of a collective collaboration, The Owls is a deconstructive queering of the Hitchockian thriller that probes evolving politics of identity and representation. Dunye and co-writer Sarah Schulman summon something closer to the disorienting documentary Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968) than Rope (1948), for the stranger and better.

SIMILAR FILMS: Kamikaze Hearts, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, The Hills, Inland Empire, The Canyons

“We created our own system, peopled by lesbians, queers and people of color, film professionals all raising themes about aging as well as inter-generational dialogue; loneliness and community; dreams raised and deferred; butch/trans anxiety; cross-racial and inter-racial desire and strain; and the history of lesbian cinema and self-representation.” —The Owls Parliament Collective

Country: United States
Year: 2010
Language: English