A documentary about the work and personality of Meir Ariel, as never revealed. A film trying to crack the enigma called Meir Ariel and understand how the abundance of the creation that was caused by him expressed his stormy soul,

Meir Ariel - A Song of Pain

William E. Jones's autobiographical film about growing up gay in the small Ohio town of Massillon pushes the boundaries of documentary by offering a moving self-portrait within the context of gay political history. William E. Jones returns to his hometown to construct an unconventional and moving autobiography.  Challenging some of the most firmly entrenched notions of filmmaking, Massillon tells its story without a single human actor, by combining beautiful images with a seductive voice-over narration.

Massillon

In this essay film, the narrator describes how his fixation on a gay pornographic model from a phone sex advertisement leads to a new project, an elegy for a complex, troubled man named Alain Lebeau.

Finished

Every image in The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography comes from gay erotic videos produced in Eastern Europe since the introduction of capitalism. The video provides a glimpse of young men responding to the pressures of an unfamiliar world, one in which money, power and sex are now connected.

The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography

Making the connection between The Smiths' working-class, Manchester-raised, ethnic Irish experience and that of the sons and daughters of Latino immigrants in Los Angeles, Is It Really So Strange? is the first documentary that allows the fans themselves to speak at length about their lives, their loves and their brief encounters with their idol.

Is It Really So Strange?

In a variation on what DJs call a “mash-up,” director William E. Jones combines segments of sound from classic foreign language films with segments of picture from gay porn films produced before 1985, making decisions based upon the length of the segments rather than their content.  The somewhat arbitrary juxtaposition of diverse “found” materials often yields surprisingly appropriate results.  v. o. suggests a new narrative space and pays tribute to a former era of gay life and cinephilia.

V.O.

Tearoom consists of footage shot by the police in the course of a crackdown on public sex in the American Midwest.  In the summer of 1962, the Mansfield, Ohio Police Department photographed men in a restroom under the main square of the city.  The cameramen hid in a closet and watched the clandestine activities through a two-way mirror.  The film they shot was used in court as evidence against the defendants, all of whom were found guilty of sodomy, which at that time carried a mandatory minimum sentence of one year in the state penitentiary.  The original surveillance footage shot by the police came into the possession of director William E. Jones while he was researching this case for a documentary project.  The unedited scenes of ordinary men of various races and classes meeting to have sex were so powerful that the director decided to present the footage with a minimum of intervention.

Tearoom

The Soviet Army Prepares for Action in Afghanistan is derived from four shots of a Soviet film called Heirs of Victory (1975) which commemorates the Allied triumph over fascism in World War II. The original film celebrates the military might of the USSR in images of explosions and armed men leaping through flames. These images are subjected to such thorough manipulation that they become patterns flickering like a multitude of abstract paintings, with digital smears standing in for squeegee marks and brush strokes. Slowly the shots become less abstract until they are completely recognizable, though still somehow rather surreal.