Abigail Severance

Evidence

In evidence, Julie Tolentino’s naked, moving body articulates backward on her hands and knees, balancing a cluster of Asian medicine cups. The piece, originally made in 2010 in collaboration with Abigail Severance, was remixed for Visual AIDS in 2014. Tolentino's self-made sound piece was added and initiates the video with a queer list of loved ones living and lost, recognizable or not, as both invocation and provocation of individuals who deeply shifted her perspective. As the listed names blur and are archived in Tolentino's body, evidence opens up to the list's potency through a female, brown, artist/activist body in the unseen yet held spaces of relationship, memory, sex and loss. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2014 as part of ALTERNATE ENDINGS, a program of seven videos that bring together charged moments and personal memories amidst the public history of HIV/AIDS.

Chain Letter

Six friends receive a mysterious chain letter via text messaging and in their email accounts from a maniac who's hunting down teenagers who fail to forward his online chain letter. Who knew they should take the threats in the chain letter seriously? Or that chain letters using the teens' favorite technologies to track them can kill? This maniacal game pits friend against friend as they race to beat rules that seem impossible to escape. Break the chain, lose a life. Do you pass it on? Does friendship mean anything?

A Quiet Little Marriage

A Quiet Little Marriage is the love story of Dax and Olive, who manage to find harmony even as they juggle family, romance and intimacy, but that all changes the night she asks him for a baby. Writer/director Mo Perkins’ intense and profound, raw feature debut is laced with sly humor, exquisitely rendered characters, and a pitch-perfect emotional honesty.

Saint Henry

Henry and Twiggy, two gender-bending delinquents break into a church and hide-out from the police for a night. While there they discover the dead body of a homeless man in the confessional, and Henry, a tom-boy with absent-father issues spends the night trying to make some sense out of the loss of this complete stranger.

Meep Meep!

Dutch doors, warehouse windows, and empty streets provide the background for a short tale about past lust and lost love. This glimpse into the drama of a lesbian relationship is revealed through stark visuals and the measured pace of the voice-over, providing a clever contrast between how we see and what we hear.

Pump

A darkly comic tale of the heart and how it might be more than the sum of its parts. Pump was Severance’s debut film and screened at over 60 festivals worldwide, winning five best short awards.

Pump

A darkly comic tale of the heart and how it might be more than the sum of its parts. Pump was Severance’s debut film and screened at over 60 festivals worldwide, winning five best short awards.