About Us
“COME ON. YOU’LL SEE TWO ACTUAL QUEERS KISSING EACH OTHER LIKE LOVERS ON THE LIPS” – JOHN WATERS
THE BLACK CAT CINEMA SERIES is a chance to bring together great queer films, from crowd-pleaser classics to hidden gems to bold new voices in LGBTQ cinema and to help foster a new community of film lovers and friends. Queer art and queer joy are important now more than ever. It is our fervent belief that now is the time to show up and show out for each other.
Join us for the series, a monthly screening loaded with goodies including Q&A with filmmakers, artists, and surprise guests at the beautiful Look Dine In Cinema in Glendale, CA where we will come together as a queer film loving community to mix and mingle at the bar post-screening.
Meet your new best friend, your next film crew member, or who knows?! Your hosts and curators are a trio of queer filmmakers themselves: Daniel Talbott, Javier Fuentes-León, and Andrew Klaus-Vineyard, who are mining the depth of queer cinematic history to bring some unexpected treasures to the screen.
Cast and Crew
Andrew Klaus-Vineyard is a proudly bisexual Los Angeles-based filmmaker, musician, theatre director, and visual artist. His films include THIS HOUSE IS NOT A HOME, Motel, Unknown, At Large, My Age Now, Like Lightning and the upcoming documentary Welcome to Tool Shed, co-directed with Daniel Talbott. Klaus-Vineyard is of Inuit, Icelandic, and Jewish descent, which fuels his passion for storytelling. He studied contemporary art and practice at Savannah College of Art & Design and holds a degree in Cultural Studies (focused on Queer, Feminist, & Marxist Theory in Media Analysis) and Time-Based Art from Portland State University and an MFA in Directing University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. He is also an internationally exhibited visual artist with commissions from The Tate Modern as well as solo exhibitions of video installations and photography. Klaus-Vineyard releases music as Lovers of the Arctic Circle. He is also a curator of the Black Cat Cinema Series (along with Daniel Talbott and Javier Fuentes-León) a monthly queer film screening series in Los Angeles, CA.
Daniel Talbott is an award-winning screenwriter and director, a Lucille Lortel Award winning theater producer, and the artistic director of Rising Phoenix Rep. His first feature film co-written and co-directed with Samantha Soule – Midday Black Midnight Blue – premiered at SIFF in Seattle and was released by Good Deed Entertainment. His feature script Gray is in active development in Denmark with Motor Productions, and his horror drama pilot Rome, Georgia (starring Mary-Louise Parker) is also in development. He is attached as the director to the feature film Last Resort, and he is in active development with the wonderful folks at Saga Film for the limited series To the Light. He is also in co-directing the doc Welcome to Tool Shed with Andrew Klaus-Vineyard. Other TV writing includes The Mist based on the Stephen King novella, and The Conners on ABC. He is a graduate of Juilliard and recently won the Golden Palm Award at the Beverly Hills Film Festival for his feature screenplay The Paris.
After graduating as a doctor in medicine in Peru, Javier Fuentes-León received an MFA in film directing at CalArts. His short film Rooms (1997) won the Peruvian National Award.
His debut feature, Contracorriente (Undertow), won 50+ international prizes, including the 2010 Sundance Audience Award. It was nominated for a Goya Award (Spains’ Oscars) and was Peru’s 2011 Academy Award submission.
His subsequent films include The Vanished Elephant (Toronto 2014) and The Best Families (Rome, Busan 2020). Fuentes-León has directed and co-written two Netflix series: Wild District (Season 1) and Contigo Capitán.
He’s the songwriter and lead singer of the indie rock band Left Avenue Joiners. He also serves on Film Independent’s Board since 2012