“Kalil Haddad has spent years transforming archives of pleasure into mosaics of pain. The filmmaker’s best-known works—strung together from repurposed fragments of adult films and skin mags—can be tenuously characterized as found-footage horror…this provocative filmmaker shrewdly retools iconographies of desire into sites of doom and death.” – Ultra Dogme

The work of Kalil Haddad is radical in form and provocation. He distorts lo-fi footage to flesh out material analyses of queer subjectivities. His work blends archival, experimental, documentary, and narrative elements that allow for a making and remaking of archival text. Seeking history as a ruin of resources, he unveils materialist truths concerning the connection between sexuality, gender, race, and class exploitation. Haddad revels in the radical possibilities of grainy schlock and lifts untold stories from the conditions of our desires.

He Never Dies presents five of Haddad’s recent shorts:  My Secret Boyfriend Died in a Mass Shooting (2025), His Smell (2023) The Boy Was Found Unharmed (2024) The Taking of Jordan (All American Boy) (2022) and Victim of Circumstance (2024). Stitching together personal footage and gay pornography, scanned celluloid unravels as Haddad shifts and destroys the digital objects of gay desire. Unveiling the labor conditions of commercialized gay sex, Haddad questions and interrogates the lives of those being exploited for the eyes of a consumptive audience. Each film follows a boy, often a porn star and always one to be desired. Haddad writes narratives onto these archetypal studs leading down fictionalized paths of murder, abuse, premature death, and unrequited lust. Lending narrative to archival footage, Haddad reinterprets sexual interactions by placing the viewer into the more violent, romantic, and emotional tenants of the subject’s lives.

The program begins with Vampires Drink Blood…I Drink Sorrow (2021) and The Beautiful Room is Empty (2020), which establishes Haddad within a queer Palestinian lineage and frames the attitude and approach he takes with his later work. Technology’s progression has created the conditions for the rapid sharing, interpretation, breaking down, and reintroduction of information to the public. Haddad’s filmmaking becomes a tool for building class consciousness as it pulls images from a radical queer history and reinterprets them in a new generational context. Sex workers have always been at the front line of the queer vanguard. Centering his story alongside broke fags, Haddad makes a remarkable statement about the political potential of experimental cinema.
(Text from Los Angeles Film Forum, partially adapted from “The Taking Of Jordan (All American Boy)” by Wilde Davis, published in Cinema Year Zero.)

A virtual Q&A with Kalil Haddad will follow the program.

Kalil Haddad is an experimental filmmaker based in Toronto. He has written, directed, and edited over a dozen short films including: The Beautiful Room is Empty (2020), The Taking of Jordan (2022), His Smell (2023), and Victim of Circumstance (2024). His work has screened at Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Images Festival, Indie Memphis, Kasseler Dokfest, London Short Film Festival, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Arkadin does not generally provide advisories about subject matter or potentially triggering content in films, as sensitivities vary from person to person. However, we encourage researching titles to determine if a screening may contain content that could be upsetting to you. Please feel free to contact us for guidance on specific films. Information about content can also be found on Common Sense Media, IMDB and DoesTheDogDie.com, as well as through general internet searches.