Film Screening & Conversation: The Gold Fish Casino

Co-presented with Three Dollar Bill Cinema.

This splashy queer musical about salmon migration, Water Wars, and the uprising of an emergent water commons is adapted from a play written by poet/theorist July Hazard. The journey of a plucky Salmon transports the audience to the surreal constructed landscape of The Gold Fish Casino where she must gamble her eggs for enough water to pass upstream to spawn. In her struggle, the Salmon encounters a menagerie of downtrodden and displaced River Creatures as well as the menacing yet tuneful Army Chorus of Engineers. As a storm brews in the distance, the Water Tycoon shuffles in for a cataclysmic showdown. Will the Salmon and her fellow creatures rise up? Or will it all go down the drain? 
 The film features a queer and trans ensemble of artists, activists, plumbers, and scientists. Rife with double entendre, musical numbers and stunning art direction, The Gold Fish Casino conjures a world at once fantastical and eerily familiar.

Following the screening, director Sarolta Jane Vay, science consultant and performer Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, and playwright July Hazard will gather for a lively conversation with the audience about their collaborations through the lenses of art, environmental, and queer practices and ideologies.

Sarolta Jane Vay (Director, The Gold Fish Casino) is an artist and filmmaker working through themes of mutual aid, public imaginations, and queer ecologies. Their previous work has examined cartography’s entwinement with rhetoric and romance adventure novels (California is an Island, 2009), the art of cluster bomb removal, and future trans/missions. They teach in the Women and Gender Studies department at San Francisco State University, having previously worked as an analog video archivist among many other things. 

July Hazard is a poet and theorist who teaches in UW's Comparative History of Ideas Program and Program on the Environment. July's current research investigates the altered shorelines of the Black and Duwamish rivers, the assembly of poetic voice under the guidance of animals, and the forest relations of trans and queer youth in rural Appalachia.

Cleo Woelfle-Erskine (Associate Producer and performer, The Gold Fish Casino) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs and affiliate in the Comparative History of Ideas. His research focuses on ecological and social dimensions of human relations to rivers and their multi-species inhabitants, and speculative and collaborative approaches to renewing human-water-fish relations. Trained in ecology, geomorphology, social science, and feminist science and technology studies, he facilitates collaborative research in partnership with tribes, agencies, and citizen scientists. His manuscript in progress is Underflow: Transfiguring riverine relations.