(note: This post is long, but it’s mostly pics. Scroll to the end for a special sing-along video!)
(from left to right: Aaron Zaragoza, H.P. Mendoza, L.A. Renigen, Don Wood, Christian Cagigal)
Photo by Kemily Visuals. Copyright © Kemily Visuals. All rights reserved.
“This story’s gone from town to town and place to place.”
The Fruit Fly Sing-Along Tour is over and the whole experience has been joyous, nostalgic, melancholy and galvanizing. Traveling from town-to-town with this time capsule of a low-budget film made it so I was constantly in conversation with crowds of people who had experienced loss and witnessed change since the last time they’d seen the film. The general sentiment during the Fruit Fly Sing-Along Tour was ubiquitous: Fruit Fly hits different in 2025.
Here are some captures from each event:
LOS ANGELES, VIDIOTS
My very quick intro shot by dear friend and filmmaker David Kittredge who traveled the same festival circuit with me for his award-winning film Pornography: A Thriller.
And here’s the Shout Along Dance Party that happened right as Vidiots closed. WHY DID WE NOT SHOOT VIDEO OF THIS, TINA, WE KILLED IT AT APACHE!!!
And here’s the outro, right after the shout along dance party. People emptied out of the big theater, folks were clamoring for a final drink at the bar. You can see writer-director Patrick Epino, filmmaker Melissa Lane and filmmaker Mallorie Ortega dancing in our emptied theater.
Thank you to Amanda Salazar, Kat Shuchter, Jason Moore and the staff of Vidiots for making our Los Angeles screening a banger.
xoxohp
SAN FRANCISCO, ROXIE THEATER
“What if we’d been found fifty years from now only in the form of an anonymous photograph?” - Old Photograph
I had just performed with Peaches Christ at PUNK PRIDE, so I was still pretty amped. This was a special screening of Fruit Fly, screening at The Roxie - the historic theater that sits in the same neighborhood where Fruit Fly was shot. Not long before the screening, the folks at the Roxie just closed escrow and now the theater has a forever home. That same week, Oasis - SF’s iconic drag club - announced that it’s shutting down. This “one-step-forward, one-step-back” feeling was an encapsulation of how everyone has been feeling in San Francisco, so I was excited that Joshua Grannell (aka Peaches Christ) was willing to moderate our Q&A.
And what a Q&A it was! I’ve watched so many Joshua/Peaches Q&As and always thought the experience was elevated by Joshua’s knowledge of film, municipal history and general curiosity. This screening was packed full of people who knew the lyrics and had seen the film at its festival premiere in 2009, so amidst the raucous singing and rowdy laughter there was a melancholy nostalgia and a surprisingly intense collective introspection in which we all took part. From the opening animation of San Francisco being repeatedly torn down and rebuilt, to the finale musical number (“Workshop”, led by L.A. Renigen) featuring multiple timelapses of San Francisco being further developed - it became clear that Fruit Fly was “hitting different” in 2025.
After the Q&A with the cast of Fruit Fly (photo by Joshua Grannell)
from left to right: Christian Cagigal, Don Wood, H.P. Mendoza, L.A. Renigen, Theresa Navarro, Aaron Zaragoza
Thank you to Peaches Christ, Lex Sloan and everyone at The Roxie for a memorable evening. #ForeverRoxie
xoxohp
NEW YORK, REGAL UNION SQUARE
“We’re gonna live life undenied!” - My Makeup
The last stop of the Fruit Fly Sing-Along Tour was as part of the New York Asian American International Film Festival whose parent organization, ACV, was celebrating its 50th anniversary.
As I always said about all of my screenings I’ve had in New York over the past twenty years, when New York shows up…they show OUT. I mean, look at the crowd who showed up for my 2023 film, Attack, Decay, Release:
The Q&A was moderated by actress and filmmaker Marissa Carpio who led a fiercely intelligent, educated and passionate conversation about the climate surrounding marriage equality when we originally shot Fruit Fly versus the re-release happening in 2025. Hear the excerpt below:
The day after this Q&A, the Supreme Court was formally asked to overturn same sex marriage.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/supreme-court-formally-asked-overturn-landmark-same-sex/story?id=124465302
Thank you to Marissa Carpio, Kris Montello, Kayla Wong, David Rances and everyone at AAIFF who made our last stop an impactful one. I always miss New York, ALWAYS. It’s nice to know that once in a while, you CAN go back home.
xoxohp
“Workshop, baby, it’s my life; I’m trying something out.
Workshop, baby, I just might do something different now.”
It took me a long time to be able to watch this film again, mostly because it’s the first thing I ever directed. It was shot for $25,000 using a cast of mostly first time actors and shooting totally guerilla. No permits, no budget, nowhere to hide. (The word we used to signal that it’s time to run from the authorities was “SCRAMBLE!!!”) But I wrote and directed this film in 2008 as a playful act of defiance, a less-than-mature middle finger to multiple establishments and an expression of love to the communities that made me who I am. What I didn’t realize was that, since 2008, I’d been forming a community of my own. Because there was never an invisible “fanbase”, only people that I’d met throughout the years that I would see perennially - and if I collaborated with you on an artistic level, even more often than that.
Fruit Fly definitely hits different in 2025. On its surface, it’s a love letter to the artists who put themselves out there in the face of rejection and ridicule. Underneath it all, it’s a rally cry to the misfits and outcasts who will forever be fighting for their right to exist in a world that’s constantly being destroyed and rebuilt into places we no longer recognize. To see the characters of Fruit Fly, a panoply of outsider queer people of color, breaking the fourth wall and pointing at the audience while shouting the words “We’re gonna live life undenied” is to see the younger versions of ourselves, still full of fire, still fighting the good fight, and reminding us that existence is, indeed, resistance.
H.P.
“WORKSHOP”
sung by the cast and crew of Fruit Fly