Mala Forever is a community-based film and digital studio that centers bold, radical, feminist storytelling
“‘Because I love pussy too.’ The words still ring in my head as if they are new…I felt seen,” recalls Kiesh, a Brooklyn-based graphic artist, in her graphic essay about her first time watching Spike Lee’s joint, “ She Hate Me”, at age fifteen. This piece is one of over a dozen multimedia projects that will be featured in “Pulp Dreams", the third installment of our nonprofit digital magazine, Mala Forever Presents . “Pulp Dreams” is the embodiment of Pride – a collection of film, visual art, and creative writing by femme and non-binary LGBTQIA2+ creators from around the world that centers brown and black experiences.
Every filmmaker can list off the movies and television shows that made them feel alive for the first time. “Pulp Fiction” at age fourteen. “Love and Basketball” at fifteen. "Y tu mamá también" at seventeen. As queer women who had grown up in a world that limited our viewing selection to the shelves at Blockbuster, every taste of love between women that we discovered on screen became a quiet revolution.
When we started Mala Forever last year – a community-based film and digital studio that centers bold, radical, feminist storytelling – we knew that it was time to feel seen as filmmakers, and as media consumers. Back in the day, even with our privilege of access to a world-class institution like NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts – where we could watch Almodóvar films on comically large laserdiscs – the experience of seeing relatable characters on screen, whose stories we could imagine ourselves slipping into as easily as women in The L Word slipped into Shane’s bedsheets, was rare. In academia we were indoctrinated into the great canon of White Male Cinema – a lineage that starts with the Lumiere Brothers, flows into “Birth of a Nation”, and ends up somewhere between Scorcese and the Coen Brothers, with queer cinema centered around cis white men like Andy Warhol and Todd Haynes. Radical women, queer and of color, have always made extraordinary films. We just never learned their names. And in our analog world, if you couldn’t name what you were searching for, you didn’t find it.
But times have changed. The world has gone digital. Social media has empowered justice movements around the world, from Black Lives Matter to #metoo. Advances in camera, mobile, and computer technologies have made media production possible for a fraction of the resources that we used to need. For creators like us, who knew from an early age that our voices and stories would never feel at home in Hollywood’s toxic masculine-capitalist machinery, there has never been a better time to build the alternative creative infrastructure of our dreams.
Photo: Matilde Viegas, Dusk
We started Mala Forever and produced Pulp Dreams with nothing more than sweat equity and our community’s support, because after more than a decade of leadership experience as community-based and commercial media producers, we’ve learned that community is all we need.
It’s time to cut out the middlemen and never look back. It’s time for our representation to mean more than token faces on a screen and a “diversity program”. It’s time for the money that we spend as media consumers to go towards uplifting and reinvesting in our communities, and to liberate ourselves from the influence of advertisers and profit. Mala Forever is a creative engine for radical femme revolution. Time, and history, are on our side.
To support Mala Forever and the work of underrepresented artists, you can make a tax-deductible donation at malaforever.com/donate. We also invite you to join our Instagram community (@_malaforever_) to connect with other radical femmes!