Bright Vignettes: How Astoria Got Its Pride

  • Director

    Patricia Silva

  • Country, Year, Length

    United States, 2025, 01:20:00

  • Category

    Narrative Feature, LGBTQIA+ Feature

  • Format

    Super 8mm, Digital

  • Festival Year

    2025

Synopsis

The first film about Astoria’s Queer culture begins outdoors in the playful sensorium of a historical cruising site from the 1800s onward, and ends in a Queer club with a call to action for the most vulnerable, five months before the 2024 presidential election in the U.S. New York City is home to The Stonewall Inn, the site of a protest in June of 1969 that galvanized the LGBTQ+ rights movement in the U.S. In this same city, there are neighborhoods celebrating their first public Pride events into the 2020s. This is the Queer side of one of those neighborhoods.

As anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the United States reaches unprecedented levels of implementation, Astoria felt the ramifications: burning a Pride flag outside its longest-running Queer bar in 2024; breaking the window of a new Queer bar in 2024; hateful comments on the public Instagram page for Astoria’s Annual Pride event in 2023; as well as ad hominem attacks documented in local news. Starting with the achievements and activity leading up to the neighborhood’s inaugural Pride event in 2023, Bright Vignettes portrays this vibrant, nurturing community of experimental performers, and progressive activists making this neighborhood “…a place to grow old in…and pass down our stories, and our cultures.”

Film Screening & Ticket Information

When & Where to See this Film!

BLOC: Queer Pioneers: 2 Films about Leadership and Pride.

KAS Zukor Theatre
8:30pm Friday, November 14th

Films in this Bloc:

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Film Information

From the Director

Director Statement

Bright Vignettes: How Astoria Got Its Pride is the first film about Astoria’s Queer scenes. Between the Children of the Rainbow Curriculum controversy in 1991 (co-led by a Queens public school teacher) and the legalization of same sex marriage in 2015, Astoria evolved from a humble, diverse émigré neighborhood into a gentrifying landscape that pushed out several Queer bars that popped up from 1980 to today. Two have survived, one is no longer Lesbian-owned but remains a pivotal performance space in the neighborhood. All our local legends have been calling it ‘home’ since the early 1990s.

With currently 4 and a half Queer bars, Astoria held its inaugural Pride event in June 2023, a joyous all-day event at Astoria Park which is itself a pre-Stonewall LGBT site in its own right. Not that there’s a plaque. Bright Vignettes is about Queer people’s history and futures and their ideas for shaping the spaces we exist in, during another politically intense chapter of American history.

Bright Vignettes: How Astoria Got its Pride is made possible (in part) with public funds from the Queens Arts Fund, a re-grant program supported by NYC Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and administered by the NY Foundation for the Arts; and with funds from the Statewide Community Regrant program, a program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature and administered by Flushing Town Hall. Additional funding provided by The Puffin Foundation.

Director Biography

Patrícia Silva is a photographer, filmmaker, and writer based in Astoria, Queens. Their award-winning short films have screened in film festivals at the British Film Institute, UK; Anthology Film Archives, USA; IFC Theater, USA; MIT List Visual Arts Center, USA; Tengis Cinema, Mongolia; Cervantes Institute, Brazil; among more. Their photographs have been exhibited in group shows at The Berlin Biennale, Germany; The Center for Fine Art Photography, USA; New Art City in partnership with The British Journal of Photography, UK; and awarded a prize by The Center for Fine Art Photography in 2023. Their on-going photographic archive and primary research of Queer spaces in Queens from 1890-2000 was recently published as its own chapter in the academic book The Physical and the Digital City, Invisible Forces, Data and Manifestations in November 2024, published by Chicago University Press. Bright Vignettes evolved out of that research, and it’s their first feature film. They are a professor of Video Art at St John’s University in Jamaica, Queens, and an instructor at the International Center of Photography.

Credits

    • Patricia Silva
      Director
    • Hassan
      Key Cast
    • Harriet Tugsmen
      Key Cast
    • Gigi St. Croix
      Key Cast
    • Anita M. Buffem
      Key Cast
    • Sherry Poppins
      Key Cast
    • Avant Garbage
      Key Cast
    • Candy Samples
      Key Cast
    • Angela Mansberry
      Key Cast
    • Ronda Vu
      Key Cast
    • Alicia Love
      Key Cast
    • Jomil Luna
      Key Cast
    • Fernando Cantreras
      Key Cast
    • Michael Miguel
      Key Cast
    • Nikael
      Key Cast
    • John Scott
      Key Cast
    • Brian Martinez
      Key Cast
    • Dave Dausch
      Key Cast
    • Sarose Klein
      Key Cast
    • Sasha Lott
      Key Cast
    • Tiffany Cabán
      Key Cast
    • Patricia Silva
      Producer
    • Salvatore Zanelli
      Composer