Barbara Hammer is a pioneer of lesbian-feminist experimental cinema, having created eighty-plus films since the start of her career at age thirty. Hammer is dedicated to making the invisible visible and feels “compelled to reveal and celebrate marginalized peoples whose stories have not been told.” Through the films in this program, she reflects on the fragility of life and her recent battle with cancer.

In Vital Signs, image and text intertwine Western constructions of death with Hammer’s personal interactions with a skeleton, clips from Renais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour, text from Foucault’s Birth of a Clinic and scenes from a hospital intensive care unit.

Sanctus is an optically-printed-dream-cum-filmsurface-reality with an incredible use of color effect, a hybrid of vintage ’50s medical footage and amazing aesthetic forms that telescope through the body as machine, dance and, ultimately, as temple.

A hopeful and layered personal film with music composed by Meredith Monk, A Horse Is Not a Metaphor offers a first-person glimpse through an experimental lens of thriving as well as surviving with cancer. Hammer reclaims a childhood dream of horses and makes it a reality, going back to nature for hope, reflection and healing. In its world premiere at Frameline32, A Horse is not a Metaphor, says Hammer, “is about the power of living in the present to the fullest and with the greatest freedom.” — D.A. JOHNSTON