Welcome to Earth, Now Get Out

More sprawling and every bit as gripping as its Oscar-shortlisted predecessor, Julia Loktev's six-hour epic My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile tracks a dozen dissident Russian journalists, mostly women, as they flee Moscow in 2022 after being branded "foreign agents." Seamlessly assembled across several countries, this must-see finds these young truth-tellers building makeshift families with their colleagues and still bravely reporting. It's an uncanny, unnerving experience (especially as an American today) with the slow recognition that fascism creeps in so stealthily that you can lose your country before you notice.

Death Valley Girls frontwoman Bonnie Bloomgarden lost her Altadena home in the Eaton Fire, and her dog not long after. "Welcome to Earth" emerged from that ruin, not as a grief record but defiant, communal, joyful psych-pop about the invisible threads between people, pets and places that don't burn. Girl-group harmonies drift through hazy psychedelia, saxophones snake through fuzz guitars, chant-ready choruses feel like we're all in the room singing together. It's the final album to feature keyboardist Gregg Foreman, who died after the sessions. That knowledge may cast a shadow, yet the record leans into the light.

I was late to the party on Canadian auteur Louise Weard's expansive, Hi8-shot, semi-improvised, trans anthology until her latest standalone installment, Castration Movie Chapter iii. Junior Ghosts—Premorphic Drift; a fragmentary passage, which has earned comparisons to Rivette and Fassbinder. A nine-year relationship fractures when Trent comes out as Tiffany (Henri Gillespi), and Izzy (Avalon Fast) hardens as her cruelty sharpens. Shot in long takes, this zeitgeist-humping vision of modern miscommunication and ugly epiphanies radically subverts the coming-out tale by focusing on the transphobic partner, though Weard herself has the juiciest lines as a problematic support-group sponsor. John Waters would tell you it's okay to laugh.

Two Questions for Annie Sprinkle. The sexologist-turned-artist and her life/creative partner Beth Stephens will be at NYC's Anthology Film Archives (Oct. 10 - 11, Saturday sold out!) for their surprisingly mirthful climate-crisis doc Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency, which will be introduced with an "Ecosex 101" primer to better love the Earth. We caught up by Zoom this week:

You've moved from sex work to performance art to academia to climate activism. Could you talk about that through-line? I've been doing work about sex for 53 years, and I'm a multimedia person so I do every kind of art. But it depends what I'm excited about and want to share, the opportunities that come. Climate change is connected, for me, to my sex education work. I was born to be an activist. I've now collected a few lifetime achievement awards, and Beth and I are getting another one in Berlin next week. I'm going out with a bang, pun intended.

When you and Beth co-direct projects, do you have habits or rules that differ from your day-to-day together? For us, life is art, and we hit it off 24 years ago. We started making art on our first date. We had an infrared camera and put it under the covers, you know, for a sexy date. So we love to collaborate, and of course we get into arguments, even about things we agree on. It gets hairy, and we get passionate. If we have a fight, I'll take 50% of the blame; I'm walking wounded. And she'll take 50%; she's the walking wounded, and we go from there.