Sid Fiore Branca

i had a total blast interviewing underground filmmaking legend Jon Moritsugu about his new film, Numbskull Revolution

an edited video of the interview will play at the Chicago premiere screening at FACETS on Friday the 13th (double feature with My Degeneration (1990))!
facets.org/programs/num...

one of my more niche unpopular opinions is that I absolutely can't stand Laura Mulvey's film theory, but I actually think Riddles of the Sphinx is a good, interesting film.

so i guess i agree that there's a vast gulf between her theory and her practice, but disagree about which is better

if you wanna see feet in lake you gotta to my instagram stories for that lol, i am Bold Online but i do not think i necessarily want to invite that can of worms on here

the book cover of Hi There Boys and Girls: America’s Local Children’s TV Programs by Tim Hollis, featuring bright colorful design and a black and white photo of a clown that is admittedly slightly testing my whole “i’m not freaked out by clowns, that’s part of why i’m doing research on why other people are” deal

found a book that might be helpful for my dissertation, i swear i am a serious academic

Sid standing in the sand at the edge of Lake Michigan at Oak Street Beach in Chicago. they are wearing a tank top and sunglasses and a backpack and holding their chaotic curtain bangs back with their hand to keep the breeze from blowing them in their face. the weather is absolutely perfect and the sky is very blue.

it’s 63 degrees fahrenheit without a cloud in the sky and i stuck my feet in Lake Michigan

thank you!! one of the things that I appreciate about MUBI is their curatorial inclusion of films under "feature" length, there are often a lot of amazing short and mid-length films on there

if anyone has ideas about distribution for a 48 minute solo performance trans as hell film (it is exactly the right length for this form!! but kinda screwed us festival-wise) & wants to support renegotiating the licensing for the two songs and the two monologues that Bree didn't write, DM me 😇

thank you!! this film was honestly such a joy to make, and such a blast to finally share it with an incredibly enthusiastic cinema full of people

1898 Aleksandr Mişon - "Bibiheybatda neft fontani yangini" YouTube video by magical media museum

i *think* "Oil Gush Fire in Bibiheybat" and "The Oil Gush in Balakhany" are slightly different pieces of footage of the same 1898 event? i picked the most legible youtube upload for that post

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSw4...

The Oil Gush in Balakhany (1898) YouTube video by Captain hard times

have felt haunted by this brief footage from 1898 ever since i saw it, and i am thinking of it again

shot by Alexandre Michon in Azerbaijan for the Lumières

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGnw...

we didn't deliberately plan to screen a film that is about, among other things, transfemininity, on the eve of International Women's Day in this strange and difficult year of 2026, but i find the synchronicity meaningful

thank you for dredging up an ancient memory that i thiiiink is of going to the Corning Museum of Glass???

finally what might be a clue as to where in upstate New York i had my first kiss (in a tipi on an alpaca farm)

we just had a packed invite-only preview screening of A Real Inverted Person at FACETS tonight and i am so lucky and so proud of the work we did on this film
🥹🥹🥹

of course this is all a little bit screwed lately because the School of the Art Institute infuriatingly laid off 3/5 of the Video Data Bank staff & subsumed VDB into the library Special Collections, so i imagine in-person access may have gotten more complicated, but the collection is still *amazing*

you can watch many Kevin Jerome Everson films in person through the Video Data Bank in Chicago, but if you or one of your collaborators are affiliated with one of the institutions listed you can watch most of the VDB collection online www.vdb.org/content/stre...

www.vdb.org/content/stre...

people sometimes assume i am a Monied Person (when i am *decidedly* not) because i travel a lot, but it's often because i am down to do shit like "train to bus to train to overnight at friend's house to bus" over a couple of days instead of one $$$$ 2 hour flight (also yes i am a sagittarius)

let no one doubt my commitment to cinema -- so i can do a fun film thing my new return travel plan is:
Chicago to Detroit by amtrak, Detroit over the border to Windsor by greyhound, then Windsor to Toronto by Via rail, crashing with a friend in Toronto, then from Toronto to Montreal by megabus

Zotero is primarily a citation/bibliography software, but i find it helpful for the web snapshot function to encourage me to engage with more longreads, & i use the paid version to sync the ~many hundreds of pdfs~ i'm reading (& my annotations) across all my devices

something i've started doing is using Zotero (and a browser plugin) to keep track of / go back to / actually read the various longer posts/articles i encounter online that seem interesting, and i do think it's helping me to complete reading more pieces and auto-scroll less

oh no even just this allusion makes me so sad! it’s like a world of perversion without perverts, which is to say, a goddamn travesty

image of Mechthild Großmann and Udo Kier in Seduction: The Cruel Woman. she is dressed in sparkling black, leaning over him as he kneels on the floor looking up at her with those beautiful, pleading eyes. he's so sad-eyed tormented pretty in this film, it's breathtaking.

went to a screening of Seduction: The Cruel Woman (1985) at @musicboxtheatre.bsky.social last night and wow wow wow, shoutout to @muscledistribution.bsky.social

fellow sickos, it's on criterion channel for now

i remember liking this one when i read it in maybe 2007, curious as to your thoughts!

sometimes i feel like i would have been put on this earth to be a slutty genderqueer rick steves yet i was born too late, cursed to the utter indignity of social media

oh Katie, i am so incredibly sorry. a family friend who might be helpful to talk to is sometimes in NY, i’ll ask about where in the world she is at the moment. i’ll be thinking of you and your family.

had a funny miscommunication moment today regarding a pizza/salad situation wherein i very sincerely but perhaps obnoxiously went “ohhhhhh you meant ranch for the PIZZA because we are in the MIDWEST”

i think it’s always good to ask for clarification of an exact date/time with this, because i’ve had there be confusion before with people interpreting “moved up” in opposite ways

yeah ignore the typo there's a lot of copy/pasting and chaotic reformatting involved in tracking these lol

i've been posting my reading logs over on an instagram story highlight (sidbranca) but oops haven't been posting them here, but if anyone is curious, here are the Things I Read Last Week

need this so bad

i listen to this song like once a week at least