Synopsis
What is the relationship between horror and queerness? Between pain and pleasure? Between death and erotics? Between a hole and a grave? “From the Ground With Love” is an episodic nonlinear short film that focuses on building a trans-poetic approach to both written, auditorial, and visual language. Experimenting with themes of queer bodily abjection, notions of home and migration, and heterosexist spatialities, this film explores the relationship between queer temporalities of life and death, this relation to the cinema of horror, and creating new modes of eroticism that center trans bodies and the lived archival experience of queer monstrosity and sex.
From the Ground With Love: be that soil, a perfectly mowed lawn, overgrown grass in a field somewhere, your garden, the wooden floorboards in your flat, or the carpeted bedroom of your childhood home, this film served as a diary; to explore, confront, process, grieve, and ultimately be at peace with certain notions of temporality and home in relation to my queer identity. This film intentionally meanders in strange ways, some fluid and others seemingly harsh and stark, mirroring my own experience of gender and sexuality at the time. In many ways I view this as a horror film, not because of any jump-scares or other common horror film tropes, but because of nightmares featuring skinny jeans, ghostly side-effects of hormone replacement therapy, pixelated multiplicity, visions of graves and gruesome public death, or abject images of ants piling and crawling over a bloodied figure’s face. Now what role does sex play in this? Erotics? Eating? Consuming? I don’t necessarily attempt to answer any of these questions in the film, however I do try to unravel them, break them down (into literal pixels, even, or maybe grammatically as well), explore their holes and surfaces, their crevices and pauses, forgotten sentences and forgotten pasts. There is no conclusion to this film, there is no real end, no final remarks or points to articulate; just the words of a figure walking home with mud smeared on the back of their jeans.
