LILY ALEXANDRE IN THE SPOTLIGHT FEB 25-28

photo credit: Notes on Vanishing by Liily Alexandre

Film • Conversation • Community

This February, our Monthly Screening Spotlight turns toward a filmmaker whose work meets this moment with clarity and courage.

Lily Alexandre is a Montreal-based filmmaker and video essayist whose work interlaces art criticism, gender theory, technological critique, and religious studies into incisive reflections on contemporary life.

Notes on Vanishing , winner of one of the best video essay in 2025 by  Sight & Sound magazine, traces the politics of being seen, mapping the fraught intersections of media, activism, and state scrutiny. Featuring Nigerian writer Unoma Azuah, the film situates contemporary trans discourse within broader structures of risk, resistance, and survival.

Produced a decade after the so-called “trans tipping point,” and in the shadow of Trump’s second inauguration within an increasingly hostile media climate, Notes on Vanishing emerged as both reckoning and survival. The work reflects a deeply personal attempt to reconcile the necessity of public resistance with an instinctive desire to retreat from the forces causing harm. In holding this tension, Notes on Vanishing becomes both political inquiry and intimate self-examination, allowing urgency and vulnerability to coexist without forcing resolution.

The work is also shaped by dialogue, through Lily’s encounters with 75 SHOTS Pocket Cinema in intimate screenings, Under the Radar gatherings, conversations with guest artists, and exchanges across our virtual Q&As. It is a film informed not only by analysis, but by relationship and community.

This event is Pay What You Can. Contributions directly support queer artists and cultural workers facing precarity, censorship, and displacement, and help sustain our growing archive. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. If you’re able, we kindly suggest a $20 donation.

Hope to see you!

The 75 SHOTS Pocket Cinema Family