SEEN Centers Queer Filmmakers and Anti-Censorship

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SEEN is a collective of filmmakers, artists and curators with the goal to disrupt the status quo by championing anti-censorship, centering queer voices and challenging the inaccessible systemic norms of mainstream film festivals. They organize screenings in community-oriented spaces while going against the pay-to-enter model commonly adopted by festivals; rather, SEEN pays artists for participation. The three main organizers of SEEN are M.O. Guzman, Lucius Garcia and Samantha Peetz.

Everything started once Guzman and Garcia met in the film program at UWM. After showing a film titled “Genderfucked” they had made for class, Guzman felt weird having to share it in a room full of cis people, recalling, “I was getting tired of only getting to share my work in spaces where it felt exploitative to be sharing it. Lucius was making some b-movie type stuff that I thought was cool, and I approached him after seeing the reactions to each other’s films to see what it would be like if we did our own thing.”

“The critiques in that class were just a lot of people saying that they were uncomfortable or that our films were cool for someone who’s queer,” Garcia adds. “They didn’t know how to properly critique our work and it felt like we were on display.”

The two decided to form SEEN (originally Seen|Scene) along with two other founders Chloe Corcoran and Callan Thomas in late 2018. They got in touch with Randy Brown, curator of the space Genesis, to host their first event in February 2019. 

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Showcasing their Work

“Our first showcase was quite literally a showcase of our own work,” Garcia reminisces. “I would reach out to people begging them to give us something and most of the time the answer was no (laughs). Now we have people all year-round asking us when we’re going to open up our DMs for submissions again.”

The four members gradually got the word out by emailing local art programs and posting on Instagram. After hosting online screenings from Cactus Club during quarantine, SEEN unveiled their official manifesto in 2021, which Guzman describes as a turning point for them as a collective. 

“Seeing a need and filling that need has definitely helped us evolve. Everything has always been submission based, so anyone who’s queer and has made work can show something. We started out with this idea that if you’re queer then inherently your work is queer, and we eventually got so many submissions that we had to learn how we were going to curate all of that, plus we had to ask ourselves what we really believe in and what we want to see from these films. It made me really think about what film means to me and why what we’re doing is important.”

Guzman became increasingly inspired from reading anarchist theory, studying queer film history and being involved with DIY punk culture, all of which they would apply to SEEN’s direction over time. The collective’s manifesto mentions that they “challenge the passivity of spectatorship” and that “we have been taught to view but we want you to see.” Expanding on what such passage means to them, Guzman shares, “SEEN is very adverse to a lot of the ways that art functions, and I think that’s what makes it so fun about the spaces that we’ve been able to function in. We’re often taught to access media in a very straightforward and plotted out way but a lot of underground film challenges that. More than that, the generalized view of most films comes from a specific lens of straightness or whiteness or cisness. We offer up opportunities to view things from both our own lenses as well as the maker’s lens.”

Multimedia Installations

One of SEEN’s most pivotal events has been “Inside Again,” their themed multimedia installation series, which debuted at the Blue Room in Sheboygan in May 2022. With an open invitation from the venue, SEEN developed a concept that came from a mixture of inspirations that they had brought up during the rebrand, including a promotional poster idea Garcia drafted and a Polaroid photograph of Corcoran’s teenage bedroom.

Garcia explains, “A lot of our connections as queer youth start out in our rooms over social media, logging on and talking to our other queer friends, and you have no idea what’s actually going on in that person’s world. We created two characters—an openly trans girl and an in-the-closet trans girl—who met online and became infatuated with each other, and we showed how they interacted. It was a very emotional project for us to do because we were digging up a lot of childhood trauma and putting ourselves back in these teenage bedrooms again to channel the characters.”

Guzman adds, “For me, the project helped me look at how I’ve wrestled with my own queerness in late adolescence and the struggle to find queer connections - both how happy it was and how isolating it was. Subculture is a big part of that, and getting to use moving images in a totally new way and screening in places outside of a typical screening space just made it such a great project.”

“Inside Again” has since been brought down to Milwaukee at the event space Underscore. “Folks really interacted with the project there the way that we intended,” Garcia said. “They were resonating with either one side of the room or the other and it was really cool to see that.”

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Gaining Prevalence 

Peetz joined SEEN after attending one of their screenings last year. “Immediately, I knew that this was exactly what I’d been looking for,” she said about getting involved. “I come from the film studies world at UWM and not so much film production, so queer film history is very much my area. I was definitely a fan first, and then M.O. reached out to me in January to talk about me being a part of it.”

Over time, queer film programming has gained more prevalence in both Milwaukee and beyond. This is where SEEN’s latest screening series “FILTH!” comes in; it debuted in January earlier this year.

“We wanted to show what other queer film programs weren’t showing,” Guzman said. “We got the opportunity to program in Chicago, and Chicago has a queer film scene already so we had to put something together that would bring queer folks out there…but we couldn’t just do anything. It needed to be big and exciting.”

“FILTH!” focuses on queer erotica films while also incorporating the historic perspectives in which queer and independent cinema grew out of necessity in queer communities. SEEN held four screenings in Chicago and five in Milwaukee this year, facing them with the challenge of making the same event successful in two different cities.

Peetz elaborates on how they pulled things off, “In Milwaukee we tried to have more of an educational leaning to our screenings; for example, one film we screened had a documentarian who educated the viewer on things like safer sex, especially during the AIDS crisis that the queer community faced in the 80’s and 90’s. It was very important for me because I was able to apply what I was learning from studying film history in school to these screenings. Then our Chicago events were bigger screenings that felt more like a nightlife activity. It’s been really exciting because we’ve had people who come to “FILTH!” screenings and then submit their very first film the next time we open submissions.”

SEEN’s Halloween-themed series “HalloSEEN'' has been a prominent event of theirs as well, held at Cactus Club the last two Octobers and spearheaded by Garcia. “It’s all horror-themed queer work,” he said. “Horror has always been my bread and butter and I love it. Samantha’s helping me out with planning the next one.”

That said, “HalloSEEN” is the collective’s next upcoming event. It is being held at Cactus Club on October 25th and then at Epiphany Hall in Chicago on October 30th. Musical acts are performing this time and it will be more of a party atmosphere. 

After that, SEEN will take time to rest and regroup before beginning programming for 2024.

Guzman concludes, “The potential for truly anarchist, self-defined work is possible right now, and I hope that when people enter a SEEN screening, they can see things in a completely different way.”

Visit SEEN’s Linktree or follow them on Instagram @seenmke for updates.