One day in the late sixties, I was on the phone with
Rahsaan and mentioned to him that just that day I had
bought a house. He responded by asking, “Does your
house have lions?” I said, “What?” He said, “Lions. You
know, like in front of a museum or the post office. You
know, concrete lions. My house has lions. Get a house
with lions.”

–Joel Dorn
May 1993
from the Rahsaan Roland Kirk Anthology

Sonia Sanchez’s book of poems for the many sisters who lost their brothers to HIV/AIDS, ‘Does your House have Lions?’, begins with this excerpt. Sanchez blurs friendship and family, tossing humour into grief, troubling history with memory. In titling her book after a found quote - at once a theft and a gift - Sanchez offers a practice of being without property, of naming without debt, of abolishing in the most ordinary.

Borrowing our film’s title from Sanchez, we share in the happenstance of words and how we meet each other in living and dying. All the while, we grasp, regard and dream.

Filmed over four years, this video document is an archive of friendship  - near, far and displaced; interrupted by sex, politics, and abandonment. These scenes hold unlikely alliances and wayward relations in the middle of fear and hesitant futures. As love manifests its totalitarian tendencies and loss is capacious, we imagine a practice of freedom.