In the 1990s, when Patricia Silva first moved to Astoria, they remember riding their bike around Queens, looking for signs of inclusive Queer culture but not finding much.
Decades later, it was just as tough to locate a public record of what had grown into the rich Queer scene in Astoria. For Silva, that lack of documentation sparked the search that led to “Bright Vignettes,” Silva’s first feature film, which is premiering at the Queens World Film Festival this week. It’s the first film they know of that documents Astoria’s Queer community. The film also has a 100% Queer cast and 95% Queer crew, according to Silva.
But the journey to a feature-length project was itself accidental, they said, a convergence of preparation, circumstance and curiosity.
Accidentally falling into their film subject
“If you’re a chef and you drop an egg on the floor,” Silva said, “you can’t recover from that accident — you have to get a new egg.”
“But in the creative process, accidents can be very helpful,” they said. “Accidents can create constraints or can show you what direction to go next.”
The “accident” of turning her documentation into a feature film began with a grant for a photography project. Silva sought to photograph the constellation of overlooked Queer places in their neighborhood. But even in major public libraries in Queens or Manhattan, they said they couldn’t find a single comprehensive book that offered a clear history of Queer life in Queens.
So Silva started documenting LGBTQ+ spaces. Once they acquired a digital camera in the mid-to-late 2000s, they began photographing events like the Caribbean Pride celebration in East Elmhurst. Over time, this became part of their ongoing research project and photographic archive, a body of work that now spans two decades.
When Astoria held its first official Pride event in 2023 (a full-day event, beyond the Pride March in 2021), Silva saw the event as a key piece to document as part of that practice. Excited by the occasion, they brought their Super 8mm film camera, wanting to capture the event the same way early Pride celebrations were documented. Filming on Super 8mm gave the footage a timeless, slightly blurred quality, so much so that the film looks as if it could have been shot in the 1970s.
“I was just so moved by the meaning of the event and what I was able to gather on film that I was like, ‘I have to make a movie,’ ” Silva said, thinking, “ ‘I have this whole project, all over this whole borough — why have I not made something close to home?’ ”
Building trust, building a feature
Silva applied for and received two grants to create a short film about Astoria’s first Pride event. The project quickly expanded. Interviewing Drag Queens, Pride organizers and others, they discovered layers of history that had never been fully documented. Some of their participants had been performing since the early 2000s; others had quietly led marches that were nearly forgotten. In one case, they found footage online to confirm the leader of a 2021 Pride march in Astoria. It was a piece of local history that had almost vanished — even from the memory of the leader, Angela Mansberry, herself, who didn’t recall the year or that it was the first Pride march in the neighborhood.
“These Drag Queens work so much they don’t remember every single thing that they do,” Silva said. Many participants in “Bright Vignettes” are “precarious workers,” often working in low-wage or non-stable jobs at restaurants, bars or as teachers, writers or Drag Queens. “That’s how much they work, and that’s how little documentation survives in the ephemeral era” of the internet, they added.
So Silva relied on their own archive. They had footage, for instance, they had taken in 2017 of some Drag Queens at Albatross; one of them, Glenda Wabbit, made an operatic cameo in “Bright Vignettes.”
But they had to apply restraint to their selection process: “I can’t just interview every Drag Queen in Astoria,” Silva said. “That would take me 10 years.” They built trust with their film participants by leading with their own lived experience: “ ‘I’m your neighbor,’ ” Silva told them. “ ‘Look at this footage that I have of you.’ ”
Silva asked participants to reflect on their relationship to the event and the neighborhood. The idea was to center joy and community pride, a counterpoint to the all-too-common tropes of adversity in documentaries of Queer people. “Bright Vignettes,” after all, is primarily a portrait of a place, and the people who have made that place.
Funding and filming joy
The production itself was modest. The funding wasn’t enough to cover a short film, much less a feature. Silva used their own equipment and leveraged their editing skills. They leaned on a small crew of five, including a composer and audio post-production professional, to bring the project to life.
The festival circuit has introduced new challenges. While larger, more prestigious festivals often expect filmmakers to handle marketing themselves, the Queens World Film Festival offered support that felt unusual to Silva. Press events, screenings and conversations with local audiences allowed them to engage directly with the community their film portrays.
“They’re really trying to build a movement, not just show films,” they said. “That’s unique.”
Looking back on the inaugural Astoria Pride event, one person said in the film that they feared someone might come to disrupt the joy — but no one did. “Everybody was just over the moon — which is, by the way, not a good recipe for a documentary,” Silva said, laughing.
It’s not that the documentary glosses over difficult subjects, and the story it tells covers some difficult chapters. Part of why there was so little history to be found about earlier days on the scene was that Astoria was more conservative in the ‘90s, when Queer communities were still struggling to dispel the stigma that lingered after the HIV/AIDS crisis.
And even now, despite gains in diversity and Queer recognition, the community still faces discrimination and hostility. “Our rights aren’t respected,” Silva said, citing incidents as recent as last year: someone spitting on a Pride flag outside a Queer bar in Astoria, and the suspect harassing and threatening workers there. In 2023, the Instagram for the first official Queer Pride event in Astoria received hate comments.
There’s also been tension within the community that Silva has tracked since their first trips around the area revealed that the scene was far from inclusive. When Silva walked into one Queer bar that was centered on gay men, the response was stares and attitude.
“That kind of thing makes you want to look for other places,” Silva said. “There’s always a gender dominance to Queer history.”
Only one bar in the neighborhood, Albatross, which calls itself “the Queer Cheers of NYC,” was lesbian-owned then.
Even so, while many docs often hinge on conflict, Silva said the film’s “role was to be true to what people actually felt,” they said. “Someone who saw the film said, ‘Oh my God, everybody’s just happy.’ And I thought, ‘what’s wrong with that? We finally got [one of the things] we wanted — why shouldn’t we be happy?’ ”
Advice for first-time feature filmmakers
- Start small and seek out help when you need it: “Sometimes I just need someone to let me know if there’s a car coming. Sometimes I need someone to hold a reflector while I film, because I can’t do that behind a camera.”
- Enjoy low-budget advantages: “I mostly work by myself. And taking photos of spaces is something that is easy to self-fund. Of course, transitioning from film to digital cameras made this possible. So now I don’t have to buy film, I don’t have to make prints. That transition also made this very doable.”
- Honor participants’ voices: “Everybody signed a contract saying I [Silva] can do what I want [with the film]. But I wanted people to feel good about my edit. I didn’t want people to feel like, ‘Well, I didn’t say it like that. I didn’t mean that.’ So participants did have a chance to see the film all together.”
- Do your research: “I became like an online internet researcher sleuth again. And deep, deep, deep in the web world, I found someone had a video of Angela Mansberry leading the first pride march [in Astoria], and they didn’t [remember] it was the first one.”
“Bright Vignettes: How Astoria Got Its Pride” will screen on Nov. 14 at the Queens World Film Festival. Learn more and buy tickets here.
Follow “Bright Vignettes” on Instagram at @brightvignettes.
