The Blood Drinkers
Pride 2024
•
16m
Directed by Wayne Koestenbaum • Drama • With Armando Grant, Alonso Díaz Rickards • 2024 • 17 minutes
Koestenbaum calls this film his first “horror film,” and says he was inspired by early David Cronenberg works, which juxtapose mental derangement, bodily metamorphosis, and modernist buildings. In The Blood Drinkers, two men, who may or not be strangers to each other, meet in a well-trafficked yet strangely deserted corner of New York City. Standing against an iconic building composed of mirrored, tilted glass, impersonal and defamiliarizing, the two flâneurs drink blood from test tubes they’ve stored in their knapsack and briefcase, and thereby fall into rapidly intensifying states of erotic derangement, aggression, stupor, and personal transformation. Koestenbaum’s use of superimposed layers—paintings, photographs, drawings, chromatic scrims—makes literal the interior states of the protagonists but also creates an alternative reality, counterpointing the silent gestures of the somnambulists. The two actors, Armando Grant and Alonso Díaz Rickards, took Koestenbaum’s suggestive, rudimentary script and engaged in a set of inventive yet understated improvisations, their created characters skirting all questions of sexual identity and emotional nourishment with a shrug and a sigh and a kiss.
Up Next in Pride 2024
-
Silverlake Life
Directed by Tom Joslin, Peter Friedman • Documentary • With Tom Joslin, Mark Massi • 1993 • 99 minutes
Independent Filmmaker Tom Joslin and his longtime lover Mark Massi battle AIDS in the days before effective medication existed. Silverlake Life debuted in 1993 — a time when demonizing queerne...
-
No Ordinary Man
Directed by Aisling Chin-Yee, Chase Joynt • Documentary • With Susan Stryker, Stephan Pennington, Billy Tipton Jr. • 2020 • 80 minutes
American jazz musician Billy Tipton developed a reputable touring and recording career in the mid-twentieth century, along with his band The Billy Tipton Trio. A...
-
Callas and Spinoza
Directed by Wayne Koestenbaum • Documentary • With Francesco Gagliardi • 2023 • 4 minutes
Shot in Koestenbaum’s painting studio, with a backdrop of 16mm film strips hanging from the wall, and a painted, silver-foil-decorated bureau-on-wheels, this playful short film explores a famous moment from...
