Queer, Broke & Amazing!

QUEER, BROKE & AMAZING! (working title) is a documentary that refreshingly challenges the myth of gay affluence and reveals an extraordinary world of resilient, economically struggling LGBTQ+ people who are surviving, thriving, and trying to get everyone free. From the Deep South, Arizona, Navajo Nation, queer coastal meccas of the U.S. and points in-between, the film chronicles the lives of more than 80 queer, broke and amazing activists who may be unsung, but you’ll never forget!

Featuring nearly 100 interviews, including Angela Y. Davis, Barbara Smith, Clair Farley, Arthur Áviles, Monica Jones, Kenyon Farrow and Mary Hooks, this stunning cacophony illuminates a universal truth about poverty.

Following the film screening, please join us for a Q&A with the filmmakers.

H.L.T. Quan is a political theorist, an award winning filmmaker, and an Associate Professor in the School of Social Transformation at ASU. Her research centers on movements for justice, and race, gender & radical thought. Her monograph (2012), Growth Against Democracy is a radical critique of modern development thought and policies. Her current book project, Against Tyranny: Ungovernability and Tools for Democratic Living explores will-full resistance to various forms of governing. Through QUAD Productions, C. A. Griffith and Quan produced/directed short and feature documentaries such as Mountains That Take Wing/Angela Davis & Yuri Kochiyama: A Conversation on Life, Struggles & Liberation, América’s Home, a film about gentrification and displacement in Puerto Rico, and most recently, Bad Form: Queer, Broke & Amazing – a film about LGBTQ+ people and the struggles for economic justice in the United States. Quan is the editor of the recent collection of essays by Cedric J. Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance (Pluto Press, 2019). In 2020, she served as the Editor in Residence for the justice related Praxis Center Blog, where robust theory+informed practice is featured.

C.A. Griffith is an award-winning filmmaker with more than three decades of film production experience. Trained in New York’s independent film community, Griffith’s credits include the feature film Juice starring Tupac Shakur, PBS and BBC documentaries such as A Litany For Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (cinematographer), D.A. Pennebaker’s Branford Marsalis: The Music Tells You (camera operator) and Depeche Mode 101 (1st AC), Eyes on the Prize I & II,  St. Clair Bourne’s Making ‘Do the Right Thing’ and music videos from Tracy Chapman and Public Enemy to The Rolling Stones. As director, Griffith’s credits include the award-winning documentary Mountains That Take Wing—Angela Davis & Yuri Kochiyama and her dramatic feature debut, Del Otro Lado (The Other Side), a Spanish language, gay male film that was shot on location in Mexico City.  Her screenplays have made the finals of the Sundance Screenwriters and Directors Labs and won a top award from the Latino Screenplay Competition.

Griffith’s publications appear in Filming Difference, Black Feminist Cultural Criticism, Black Women Film and Video Artists, The Wild Good, the journals Meridians, Signs and Calyx.