“North By Current” is a visual rumination on the understated relationships between mothers and children, truths and myths, losses and gains. After the inconclusive death of his infant niece, filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax returns to his rural Michigan hometown determined to make a film about a broken criminal justice system. Instead, he pivots to excavate the depths of generational addiction, Christian fervor, and trans embodiment. Like the relentless Michigan seasons, the meaning of family shifts, as Madsen, his sister, and his parents strive tirelessly to accept each other.
Angelo Madsen Minax works in documentary and hybrid filmmaking formats, narrative cinema, experimental and essay film, sound and music performance, text, and media installation. His projects explore queer and trans intimacies, chosen and biological kinships, cosmic, natural, and technological phenomena, and often draw on personal histories and experiences in justice-oriented communities. Madsen's works have screened and/or exhibited at spaces including the European Media Art Festival (Germany), the Ann Arbor Film Festival (MI), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Anthology Film Archives (NYC), Harvard, Yale, The British Film Institute (UK), Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), REDCAT (Los Angeles), and hundreds of LGBT film festivals around the world, from Osaka, Japan to Montevideo, Uruguay. He has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Core Program, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Berlinale Doc Station, Queer|Arts|Mentorship and others. Minax is currently an Assistant Professor of Time-Based Media at the University of Vermont.