New Artist Member: Malic Amalya
Posted March 1st, 2023 in Announcements, New Acquisitions, New Digital Files, New Films, News / Events
Canyon Cinema is pleased to welcome the Boston-based filmmaker Malic Amalya to the collection!
Malic Amalya (b. 1980 – Burlington, VT) is a white, transgender filmmaker working across 16mm, video, and performance. His films are situated between formal avant-garde traditions, the anti-assimilation subculture of queercore, and intersectional feminism. His creative framework is informed by prison abolition, decolonization, anti-racism, gender self-determination, disability justice, anti-capitalism, and climate justice.
Malic is an Assistant Professor of Experimental Media and Film Production at Emerson College. He earned an MFA in Moving Image from the University of Illinois-Chicago, an MA in History and Theory of Contemporary Art from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a BA from Hampshire College. He was an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and has been an artist in residence at Signal Culture and the Vermont Studio Center.
Malic’s films have screened in festivals, museums, and queer bars across the world. Festival screenings include Ann Arbor Film Festival, Blonde Cobra Festival (Cologne), Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Engauge Experimental Film Festival (Seattle), Festival Les Merveilles (Paris), Crossroads (San Francisco), MIX Copenhagen, the Scottish Queer Film Festival, Cinema of the Dam’d (Amsterdam), EXiS Festival (Seoul), Onion City (Chicago), MIX NYC, Light Field (San Francisco), and the TIE Cinema Exposition (Milwaukee & Montreal). Museum exhibitions include the Transgender Museum of Art and Herstory exhibition at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon and the Museum of Northwest Art in Washington State. Visuals for dance nights at queer bars include Buttcocks at Club SchwuZ in Berlin, Trqpiteca at Danny’s in Chicago, and Other Stranger at The Stud in San Francisco.
From 2012 – 2019, Malic was the organizer and curator of INFRARED: New Visions from the Queer Underground, which screened at Three Dollar Bill Cinema (Seattle), Anthology Film Archives (NYC), San Francisco Cinematheque, Gender in Translation Symposium (Oakland); Trans-Ocular: New Perspectives in Transgender Art, Media, & Politics (Philadelphia); and Radically Gay: The Life & Visionary Legacy of Harry Hay (NYC). In 2020, he organized and co-curated the exhibition Resisting Incarceration Culture at the California College of the Arts.
Since 2014, Malic has been collaborating with his boyfriend, Nathan Hill, under the name Vitreous Chamber. They live and work together in Boston, MA.
Malic’s film, RUN! is now available from Canyon Cinema. For more about the film, check out Greg Youmans’s essay “Pest Control: Malic Amalya’s RUN! Explores Precarity and Complicity Under American Militarism,” on Canyon Cinema Connects.
RUN! (Malic Amalya, 2019, 10 minutes, color, sound, 16mm or digital file)
Filmed at sites of nuclear development, detonation, industry, tourism, and activism, RUN! examines the ways in which ideologies of war structure landscapes, community rituals, cinematic technology, entomology, pandemic management, and even notions of LGBTQ liberation.
