BIOGRAPHY
​
​Angelo Madsen Minax is a multi-disciplinary artist, filmmaker, and educator. His projects consider how human relationships are woven through personal and collective histories, cultures, and kinships, with specific attention to subcultural experience, phenomenology, and the politics of desire. Madsen's works have shown at Berlinale, Sundance Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, BAM CinemaFest, Art of the Real at Lincoln Center, Anthology Film Archives, British Film Institute, and dozens of LGBT and experimental film festivals around the world. He is a recipient of awards and fellowships from the Sundance Film Institute, BAVC Media, New York State Council on the Arts, the Warhol Foundation, LEF Foundation, and has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Yaddo, MacDowell, Pioneer Works, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and others. His film, "North By Current" (2021), aired on season 34 of POV (PBS), was nominated for an Independent Spirit award, and won the Cinema Eye Honors Spotlight award, Best Writing award from the IDA and numerous festival jury prizes. A New York Times Critics Pick, "North By Current" has been called "A beautiful, complex wonder of a film," by Rolling Stone and "A titanic work" by Criterion. Madsen is currently an Associate Professor of Time-Based Media at the University of Vermont, a current USA Artists Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow.

FRAMES OF REFERENCE, FALL 2023
ANGELO MADSEN MINAX
​
PROGRAM ONE: Tuesday, November 28th - 7pm
Ukrop Auditorium, Robins School, University of Richmond
Screening: North by Current, 2021, 80 minutes

North By Current (2021)
After the inconclusive death of his young niece, filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax returns to his rural Michigan hometown, preparing to make a film about a broken criminal justice system. Instead, he pivots to excavate the depths of generational addiction, Christian fervor, and trans embodiment. Lyrically assembled images, decades of home movies, and ethereal narration form an idiosyncratic and poetic undertow that guide a viewer through lifetimes and relationships. Like the relentless Michigan seasons, the meaning of family shifts, as Madsen, his sister, and his parents strive tirelessly to accept each other. Poised to incite more internal searching than provide clear statements or easy answers, North By Current is a visual rumination on the understated relationships between mothers and children, truths and myths, losses and gains.

PROGRAM TWO: Wednesday, November 29th - 7pm
Ukrop Auditorium, Robins School, University of Richmond
Screening: Shorts Program + in-person Q&A w/ Minax
​
The Year I Broke My Voice (2012)
Set in a post-industrial ‘Neverland’ of worn down row houses, looming factories, and desolate seashores, a rabble of deprived gender and age ambiguous youths explore their own vulnerabilities and put pressure on what it means to grow up. Misadventures that include impromptu races, nighttime spooning, cheating in card games, attempts at hypnotism, pocket knife haircuts, and sexual fantasies all function as means for the characters to attempt knowing one another. Through understated vignettes, solitary moments of introspection, and budding intimacies, The Year I Broke My Voice offers an alternative perspective on coming of age that emphasizes perpetual states of becoming over conventions of linear development into adulthood. Built from interpretations and reenactments of some of the most widely known examples of 1980s coming of age films, including The Outsiders (1983), Stand By Me (1986) and The Year My Voice Broke (1987), The Year I Broke My Voice re-approaches the master narrative of childhood’s transition into adulthood from a subversive, yet altogether fragile and uncertain vantage point. 

Steps on the Water (2019)
Two boys discuss the nature of their friendship, the banal passage of time in their small town, and their local IG bullies. The camera search for the right way to describe the feeling of connection. As a live performance, Madsen (the narrator, who also delivers musical accompaniment/soundscaping live) asks questions to Siri, whose unpredictable responses become a proxy point of contact between the two characters on screen and the live narrator. Throughout the course of the film, the narration and soundscape begin to slowly transform into a haunting cover of the queer love anthem, Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love.” A wrestling match ensues.

Stay with me, the world is a devastating place (2021)
In a time-warping dramaturgy, the anchors of Dallas Texas' Channel 8 news circa 1970 are reimagined as pseudo-divine bearers of a potential truth, transplanted from 50 years in the past and appearing before our eyes to weave a proclamation of impending doom. In poetic decree, we are told in great detail the peril of our world, yet offered no explanation of how to prevent it, nor the definitive cause. Commissioned by the G. William Jones Film and Video Collection, Dallas, TX.

Bigger on the Inside (2022)
From an isolated wooded cabin a trans man star gazes, scruff chats with guys, watches youtube tutorials, takes drugs, and lies about taking drugs - feeling his way through a cosmology of embodiment. Relative to the immensity of longing, the bodily insides become both portal and lens through which to probe the porousness between interior and exterior, the micro and macro. Nudes and landscapes are equally erotic, as Eros is an issue of boundaries: When i desire you, a part of me is gone.