cooperative members ruth anne beutler, chisato hughes, yasmine benabdallah, oana țenter, lara saab, and lalu ozban.
timetides cooperative is a Bay Area-based transnational group of trans, nonbinary, and women artists who imagine new worlds through reclaiming filmmaking as conversation and collective, relational experience. Rooted in care and cultural specificity, we commit to each other’s visions through shared study, co-creation, and exchange. Our mission is to build sustainable lives for ourselves as filmmakers and cultural workers, to create opportunities for other Bay Area filmmakers through film work, and to use our cooperative work to create transformative conversations through making and screening films. Our projects move with the tides of time and emerging events: from a public history film led by coastal Indigenous voices on California missions to a queer diaspora fundraiser for immigration fees to a public performance on life after Beirut's 2020 port explosion.
Over the past five years, our cooperative has taken fluid and flexible shapes as we have shifted between directing, producing, shooting, editing, writing, and consulting roles on each others’ short films and multidisciplinary projects. Our ongoing and overlapping projects are dynamic, relational, and grounded in care and commitment to each other and our work. Our conversations amidst the backdrop of war and ecological crisis continually circle around re-thinking and re-imagining our many worlds – how to not only collectively survive, but flourish.
The current decimation of public television and public arts funding is a devastating blow to the already frail support structures for independent filmmaking and distribution. Meanwhile, in the Bay Area and globally we feel the consequences of wealth inequality, shelter-as-commodity rather than basic necessity, and the emergence of techno-fascism. More than ever, we feel the call for a re-imagining of the possibilities of cooperative practices in work, housing, and resource-sharing as critical ways of re-orienting ourselves and our communities toward resiliency. Our cooperative practices of sharing skills, tools/equipment, time, energy, and social influence/resources are adaptive and effective means of supporting life and creative work. We envision this network reaching to the global home communities of which we are a part in order to transmit resources and opportunities to other artists in less-resourced locations with whom we collaborate and create.
Through developing our new film project, Behind the Horizon Line (our most ambitious to date), we have formed relationships with funders including the Berkeley Film Foundation and established fiscal sponsorship with The Gotham. We are creating a robust community engagement and distribution plan with the intent to solidify our cooperative as a visible creative entity in the Bay Area and beyond, expanding our capacity to create film projects that will enable us and others to sustain personal and communal life.
The priority populations/communities for our work are those who reflect our own many identities: queer, migrant, student, limited-income, disabled, diasporic, trans, nonbinary, women, and people of color.