It is also known as the "MIX festival," for its most visible program, the annual week-long New York Queer Experimental Film Festival (NYQEFF), which has featured early works by filmmakers such as Christine Vachon, Todd Haynes, Isaac Julien, Thomas Allen Harris, Barbara Hammer, Juan Carlos Zaldivar, Jonathan Caouette, Jennie Livingston, Gus Van Sant, and Matthew Mishory.
[2] They were aided by curators Jack Waters and Peter Cramer from Naked Eye Cinema and Ela Troyano who programmed The New York Film Festival Downtown.
MIX soon became very influential on other programming venues, often contributing significant work to The Whitney Biennial, Berlin International Film Festival and other important screens.
The festival has shown the work of filmmakers such as Barbara Hammer, Nisha Ganatra, Teri Rice, Jonathan Caouette, Juan Carlos Zaldivar and Isaac Julien among hundreds more.
Among many fabulous moments in the festival's history was MIX's screening of Andy Warhol's Blow Job which was attended by Kitty Carlisle Hart in a gown with a tuxedo'd escort.
In 1993, Frilot and Karim Ainouz were the co-directors,[2] and introduced many changes, including the name MIX, the production of a catalog (instead of handing our program notes), a new venue (The Kitchen instead of Anthology Film Archives) and a commitment to multicultural presentations and installation work.
It was a special show featuring Teri Rice's The Kindling Point and Les Affaires, at the Ann Street Bookstore in Lower Manhattan, where the peep booths were reprogrammed with experimental video, and 16mm film was projected in a separate room.
Ainouz scaled back his involvement, and Frilot became the definitive voice of MIX, making the organization a home for emerging filmmakers and makers of color.
1996 was the festival's 10th anniversary, and in honor of this milestone MIX presented queer work from the African diaspora at the Victoria Theater in Harlem, in addition to its downtown programs at NYU's Cantor Film Center and the Knitting Factory.
Roy brought on Anie Stanley as artistic director in 1998, and as a team they propelled MIX to greater visibility, with more corporate sponsorship, but with less emphasis on the identity politics of the early 1990s.
1998 also saw a sidebar of 8 mm films curated by Stephen Kent Jusick, featuring work by both contemporary makers and old masters, such as Jack Smith, "The Story of the Red Rose" by Juan Carlos Zaldivar and Andy Warhol's Polavision home movies.
MIX NYC as an organization took a new direction in 2003, when it initiated the ACT UP Oral History Project, run by Hubbard and Schulman (www.actuporalhistory.org), and funded by a grant from the Ford Foundation.
A large-scale installation called Cake, about garment workers, by Mary Ellen Strom & Ann Carlson, debuted at South Street Seaport as the festival centerpiece.
Yet MIX was unable to capitalize on the success of Tarnation, and financial troubles led Shea to move the festival from November to April 2005, skipping 2004 entirely.
Larry Shea left MIX after the 2005 festival to devote more time to his video art, and a new team was appointed in the fall, including Andre Hereford, Szu Burgess, Kate Huh and Stephen Kent Jusick.
Another highlight was a screening of a rare 16mm print shot by Women's Liberation Cinema (Kate Millett and Susan Kleckner, among others) of the 1971 gay pride march in New York.
Ceiling to floor glass windows gave MIX unprecedented street visibility, including projections by Lori Hiris and Kadet Kuhne.
A live actor inhabited the dome, silently lying there, listening to records, lighting incense and ruminating, while 3 projections illuminated some of the panels with scenes of a same-sex love and commitment.
[3] Using three theater spaces in the TNC complex, MIX emphasized an immersive environment with a string art design in the venue by Diego Montoya.
Another theater was turned into an installation lounge, anchored by Blaise Garber-Paul's Queer Fruit Tree, which grew and changed throughout the week, and under which visitors could sit on astroturf, or on conical black cushions.
This downstairs space was a lounge, had a second stage used for performances, and contained most of the installations, including work by Adriana Varella, Szu Burgess, Coco Rico and others.
[3] The event including members of XFR Collective, an archiving group which offered to digitize attendees' home videos and other film for free.