A Spell For Queer Home

The wild landscape of Utah was the first place to hold filmmaker, Amanda Madden. Then they had to leave to find themself. After a decade in New York, where they named and settled into their queerness and transness, they returned to Utah in the summer of 2020. They were a fragile and unrooted thing. They craved queer community and a sense of belonging. In July of 2021, they were a resident artist at the Home of the Brave residency in Cisco, a ghost town in Southern Utah. They spent 3 weeks in the heat and solitude, meditating and reflecting on the questions that had been building in them about queer home. They used movement, intuition, and magic to explore these questions in their body and let the wild and sacred shapes of the ghost town guide them. They called 18 queer and trans friends, lovers, and mentors across the country and asked them about queer home. This time in the desert was a cathartic deepening and release. They edited the film over the next year, weaving together their embodied exploration and the interviews, and worked with 3 queer musicians to create original spell songs to guide the journey. The process of making this film has in itself been a queer home for Amanda. They are so moved by the collective stories and wisdom we hold. They believe, deep in their bones, that queer home is possible, radical, and happening. This film is a spell to conjure a sense of queer home for themself, their community and the collective – to know that we are enough, that we were never meant to do this alone, that queer home is possible, radical, and happening.