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Ela Troyano, Latin Boys Go To Hell, 16mm, 71min., 1997
Ricardo Gamboa, Brujos (Episode 5: "Leo"), HD Video, 11min., 2017
Dirty Looks celebrates 7 years of programming with a New Queer Cinema telenovela and a brown queer witch PhD webseries! Shot in the East Village of the 1990s, Ela Troyano's LATIN BOYS GO TO HELL is a gay telenovela for the 90s film festival circuit scene, a stark and playful coming of age for the 20-year old Justin, who pines for his cousin Angel, rooming with him on an extended visit. They hit the local clubs and collide with the murderous jealously orbiting around the hunky model Carlos (photographer Mike Ruiz). Featuring cameos from José Esteban Muñoz and Carmelita Tropicana, the feature will play off an episode of Ricardo Gamboas recent web series, Brujos - which follows four queers-of-color as they move through grad school and come into their supernatural powers, forming a coven in Chicago. Hot on their tails is a band of witch hunters: white, wealthy descendants of the first New World colonizers.
Ela Troyano is an interdisciplinary filmmaker, born in Cuba and based in New York City. Her projects bring together different aesthetic histories and genres: downtown New York avant-garde film and performance, queer cinema, Cuban-American cinema-in-exile and Latina film and video. Troyano's work explores the connections between performance and film through the lens of guerrilla practice: camouflage and insurrection conceptually shape both the form and content of her work. Her performance based projects blur the line between installation and live action, while her experimental filmmaking troubles the traditional relationships of documentation and distribution.
Writer, Director Ricardo Gamboa is an artist, activist and academic working in his native Chicago and New York City. Ricardo is the winner of numerous awards, fellowships and grants such as a MacArthur Foundation International Connections Award, Latino ImPACT Playwrights Award, and a McCracken Fellowship at New York University (NYU). This year, he was a finalist for Sundance Film Festival Latino Film Fellowship and Latino Screen Writing Project. He is a Critical Collaborations Fellow at NYUs Global Network University (2016- 2018). In Chicago, he is a company member of Barrel of Monkeys, Southside Ignoramus Quartet and Free Street Theater. He is the founding Artistic Director of Teatro Americano and founding adult partner of the controversial youth ensemble The Young Fugitives. In New York, he was a fellow of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics EmergeNYC program and company member of the New York Neo-Futurists. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois, Urbana; received his Masters in Arts Politics from New York Universitys Tisch School of the Arts; and is currently pursuing his doctorate degree in American Studies at NYUs Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. His short film The Southside Has Many Beauty Queens was winner of the Best Short at Chicago Latino Film Festival and his feature debut Maydays received standing-only crowds and critical praise from the festival.
presented in collaboration with: