by Mattie Lucas
Cinema from a Decidedly Queer Perspective
The Radical Queerness of Alice Maio Mackay
Australian filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay was not yet 18 when her debut feature, So Vam, premiered in 2021. Now 20, Mackay has a staggering five feature films under her belt, a filmography that has quickly become one of most thrilling and radical bodies of work by a queer filmmaker in ages.
Satranic Panic | 2023
If we don't tell our own stories - who will? For a film like Satranic Panic, an indie Australian horror film directed by a 19-year-old trans woman, its very existence feels like an act of rebellion. It's certainly messy, its edges ragged and unrefined, but that DIY aesthetic is part of what makes it feel so authentic. What director Alice Maio Mackay (who has now made five feature films before the age of 20) is doing here is reclaiming trans stories from cis framework.
For most of its life, the Cannon Group was a minor studio known for brawny B-movies like Death Wish, Cobra, Missing in Action, and Masters of the Universe. But during the 1980s, under the direction of co-owners Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, who bought the company in 1979, Cannon also used some of its profits to take chances on risky auteur-driven projects in an attempt to gain some prestige. One such project was Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear, a deal Golan and Globus infamously made with Godard on a napkin at the Cannes Film Festival, where the pair were tenaciously courting filmmakers.