Join a very special Portland premiere of director Chad Brown’s new documentary Unseen: Invisible Wounds, Invincible Spirit. Taking place the week of Veterans Day, this film follows five veterans as they bike through two hundred miles of raw, unforgiving wilderness on a trail that asks everything of you and gives back something no clinic or desk job ever could. Following the film, director Chad Brown will be joined on stage for a Q&A about the film.
They came to Lakeview, Oregon, carrying things that don’t fit in a pack. Five veterans. Two hundred miles of raw, unforgiving wilderness. One trail that asks everything of you and gives back something no clinic or desk job ever could. Unseen begins at the edge of what most people call the end of the map Lakeview, Oregon, the last frontier, the quiet gateway to the Oregon Timber Trail; from that threshold, it launches something that can only be called a reckoning. This is not an adventure film. This is a document of survival, of spirits refusing to be broken, of invisible wounds meeting invincible will. Five veterans strap into their bikes and ride into the kind of silence that forces you to finally hear yourself. The cameras go with them. And what unfolds over volcanic plateaus, through alpine forests and ancestral lands, across a living corridor of history that stretches 600 miles from the California border to the Columbia River Gorge is something that will not let you look away. But Unseen is not only the story of these five riders. It is haunted by another story one America nearly buried. The Triple Nickel. The 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion. America’s first Black smokejumpers, who were dispatched to Oregon’s forests during World War II on a covert mission called Operation Firefly protecting this very land from Japanese incendiary balloon bombs at a time when their country denied them the right to fight as combat soldiers overseas. They parachuted into burning forests to save a nation that had not yet decided to save them. Their bravery was classified. Their names, forgotten. Their sacrifice, erased. Today, as five veterans pedal through the same wilderness those men protected with their lives, their ghosts ride alongside. The Oregon Timber Trail becomes something more than a route. It becomes a corridor of memory. A long-overdue act of remembrance.
2026. Directed by Chad Brown. Runtime: 65 minutes.
See full details at tomorrowtheater.org.
Shu Lea Cheang is an artist, conceptualist, filmmaker, and networker who has worked in the field of net-based installation, social interface, networked performance, and film production. Her work traverses between hard and soft, sex and politics, fiction and reality, fantasia and earth-bound.
Fresh Kill (1hr 20min) 1996: Shareen and Claire, a lesbian couple living on Staten Island, find themselves ensnared in a vast conspiracy involving a ghost ship of nuclear refuse, ominous television commercials, and deadly cat food.
SEX FISH (6mins) 1993: An erotic lesbian video involving swimming upstream, female power, and fish love. Made as a collaboration under the name E.T. (Ela Troyano) Baby (Jane Castle) Maniac (Cheang). “In Sex Fish water provides the common denominator for nature imagery and explicit sex. Unlike 1970s feminist imagery, however, nature is sexualized rather than sex naturalized. Dripping from the faucet, spraying against a shower curtain, swirling down a toilet, water leads viewers from one sex scene to another, private to public and back again. Swimming through the video are various fish, seemingly unaware of the derogatory pun they enact, and all gulping enviously as cunnilingus surrounds them.” —Chris Straayer, Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-orientations in Film and Video (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)
SEX BOWL (7:43 mins) 1994: All forms of human sport become sites for sexual play and celebratory eroticism.
“The tape’s images are quick, suggestive, and sexy: fingers moving into bowling balls, shoe-smelling and toe-sucking, a dog wearing chain jewelry, fish being wrapped at the market, young naked couples having sex…. Edited like a music video, the image track is a constant flow of fetishes that lure us into the promiscuous pace of girls who keep lists of their sexual encounters.” —Chris Straayer, Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-orientations in Film and Video (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)
FINGERS AND KISSES (4:35 mins) 1995: Cheang has taken her camera to the streets for a candid glimpse of lesbian public sexuality. If Asian women and lesbians share a certain amount of invisibility in the culture, Fingers and Kisses offers not only a bold representation of both, but a challenge to the question “What do lesbians do?” Tokyo’s own out-and-loud music by Chu punctuates the narrative as what begins in the streets continues under the sheets.
COMING HOME (5mins) 1995: This humorous video begins with two women—one white, the other Asian—attempting to fit into a Japanese bathtub. The awkward fitting of bodies into a small space is just one of the allegorical scenarios dramatized in a pressing appeal for lesbian rights. In a game of hanafuda (flower cards), the terms of lesbian domesticity are cleverly played out according to such legalities as joint property, social security, and pensions.
See full details at tomorrowtheater.org.