Vtape

e-flux Film presents the April 2026 edition of the online series Staff Picks, organized in collaboration with and featuring three works by Kyoko Michish*ta: Cherry Blossoms (1975), Being Women in Japan Series: Liberation Within My Family (1974), and Video Portraits – Men: Shuntarō Tanikawa (1982).
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“Everything I do is related,” Kyoko Michish*ta, Japanese feminist artist and translator, told curator Jesse Cu***ng in 2023. “I’m always in search of questions related to aesthetics, fairness, and democracy, whether I’m writing, filming, or videotaping. Fairness, democracy, peace, beauty, pleasure, sincerity, and honesty, they are all equally important to me.” Michish*ta was one of the first artists in Japan to adopt video technology. In the early 1970s, she joined the Video Hiroba collective that included Toshio Matsumoto and Hakudō Kobayashi, and pushed that group’s emphasis on video as a consciousness-raising tool to include feminist principles. Her moving-image work can be separated into major strands, though these commingle and inform one another: experimental works, sometimes shot on film, observing natural phenomena and everyday scenes in the northern region where she lived for much of her life, first-person documentaries about women’s issues in Japan, and interviews with prominent male figures in Japanese culture whom she believed proposed alternatives to its dominant patriarchal sentiments.
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Since 2022, Vtape has been working to restore, digitize, translate, and subtitle Michish*ta’s work, making her films and videos available again for public presentation for the first time in decades. Since the project began, Kyoko Michish*ta’s work has been the subject of exhibitions and screenings internationally and of renewed scholarly interest. Vtape currently distributes ten titles, with more to come, and in collaboration with them this edition brings together three works by Michish*ta.
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Watch it at the link in bio.

Hotseat is a screening series of experimental video work from the legendary Vtape catalogue. The program was prepared by curators from Queen's Screen Cultures & Curatorial Studies MA/PhD. Sessions will take place on April 18th and 19th at the Screening Room, 120 Princess Street, Downtown Kingston. Free!

🎥 Hotseat
🗓️ April 18–19, 2026
⏱️ 4:00 pm–6:20pm
📍The Screening Room, 120 Princess Street, Kingston ON

The screening series consists of four programs: April 18th opens with ‘ICU (Image Care Unit),’ curated by Habibi Wang, which remakes the cinema into a clinic. The evening continues with ‘Non-standard munitions package (improvised cyclic fire),’ curated by Andrei Pora, which examines the repurposing of military techniques by contemporary video artists.

April 19th begins with ‘On Rites of Resistance,’ curated by Geoffrey Webster and Vincent E., which brings together ways to make spaces of shared survival. The series concludes with ‘Maskwa,’ curated by Sasza Hinton, which illustrates the everyday experience of Indigenous grief, both personally and communally.

Come and experience diverse programming reflecting the overlapping urgencies of our times! All sessions will be followed by Q&A with the curators.

Hotseat is coordinated by Gabriel Menotti and Deirdre Logue, with the support of Queen's Film & Media, Vtape, Kingston Cinema Society, and the Besides the Screen network.

✨The has just launched Tramps, Troublemakers and Trailblazers: Trans Filmmakers!

This new collection includes works by Vtape artists Mirha-Soleil Ross and Xanthra Phillippa MacKay. Keep reading for the full scoop!✨

Boundary-breaking filmmakers reclaim their stories with these richly varied looks at the trans experience. Long misrepresented on-screen through disreputable and actively harmful images, trans characters have come into focus thanks to a pioneering generation of trans directors determined to capture their lives with nuance and hard-won insight. Curated by Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay, authors of the book “Corpses, Fools, and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema,” these revealing counterhistories of cultural trailblazers (RUPERT REMEMBERS, GENDER TROUBLEMAKERS, NO ORDINARY MAN), intersectional portraits of everyday survival (DRUNKTOWN’S FINEST, LINGUA FRANCA), and bold explorations of identity in the online age (WE’RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD’S FAIR, CASTRATION MOVIE ANTHOLOGY I. TRAPS) show that there is no single, common trans film image but rather a kaleidoscope of voices, forms, and lived realities.

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✨Announcing our APRIL 2026 Criterion Channel lineup! ✨ Next month, step into the high-powered boardrooms where dirty deals and vast conspiracies unfold in our Corporate Thrillers collection. New director retrospectives spotlight the radical documentaries of Emile de Antonio and three classic noirs by Jacques Tourneur, while Tramps, Troublemakers, and Trailblazers surveys an emerging generation of trans auteurs. We’re also raiding our archives for a new ongoing feature: out-of-print Criterion editions with their hard-to-find special features. There’s so much more to choose from this month, including a new installment of Adventures in Moviegoing with Mary Bronstein, the exclusive premiere of Bi Gan’s RESURRECTION, and short films from BLUE HERON director Sophy Romvari.

This April, we invited Fiona Enright, our YWC intern, to select our Video of the Month from the hundreds of videos she has watched and catalogued. Here's what she had to say!

“Poetic and sensorially rich, Maha Maamoun’s Shooting Stars Remind Me of Eavesdroppers transports viewers to a resplendent day in Cairo’s al-Azhar Park. Amidst the ambient hum of urban life, the rustle of wind through greenery, and the careful movements of egrets, a couple navigates intimacy and truth through a conversation on eavesdropping. The video opens with a cosmic allegory of ever-watchful stars, evoking the transgressive and voyeuristic dimensions of listening in on others. It implicates the viewer in the very transgression it contemplates, raising the question of whether we might be punished by the cosmos for our own eavesdropping.”

🎞️ Now streaming on Vtape.org
🌐 Link in bio

Image credits: Shooting Stars Remind Me of Eavesdroppers, Maha Maamoun (2013)