WE ARE PAT // screening and Q&A with filmmaker Rowan Haber

WE ARE PAT explores the evolution of gender identity and comedy from the ’90s to the present day through the lens of the iconic Saturday Night Live sketch, “It’s Pat.” The film examines Pat’s origins as a joke rooted in the cultural anxiety of the ’90s around gender while drawing striking parallels to today’s culture wars around transness and queerness. Trans and non-binary comedians and culture-makers reimagine and rewrite the original Pat sketches, using camp and humor to reclaim and re-envision an iconic character in American comedy. The film explores humor as both a tool of oppression and a radical force for change. Beyond comedy, WE ARE PAT raises complex questions: How does art age? What responsibility does a creator have as cultural values evolve? Can we reclaim narratives that once mocked us, transforming pain into laughter, visibility, and ultimately, our own creations? (Rowan Haber, United States, 2025, 86 minutes, DCP)

Following the screening, director Rowan Haber will be joined by Bel Olid (Assistant Instructional Professor in Catalan and Spanish) for a Q&A.

Director Rowan Haber is an aesthetically-minded Writer/Director. An MFA graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, they were a Sundance Momentum Fellow, a Sundance New Frontier Lab and Art of Practice Fellow. They were selected for the Universal Pictures Directing Lab, AFI’s Directing Workshop for Women, Film Independent’s Episodic Lab and Project Involve, Outfest’s Screenwriting Lab, and were a shadowing director on FX’s Pose. They were featured on The Alice Initiative’s 2018 list of directors ready to helm studio films, Indiewire’s 8 Best Trans Directors Working Today, and have been a fellow at Yaddo, MacDowell and UCross Artist Residencies.

Bel Olid is a writer, translator, Assistant Instructional Professor in Catalan and Spanish at the Romance Languages & Literatures Department and Affiliated Professor at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, both at University of Chicago. They became known in 2010 with the Documenta prize for their novel Una terra solitària. That same year, they were also the recipient of the Rovelló essay prize for their book Les heroïnes contrataquen. Models literaris contra l’universal masculí a la literatura infantil i juvenil. In 2012 they won the Roc Boronat prize for La mala reputación, a brief narrative that was widely acclaimed by critics and readers alike. They are a regular contributor to cultural media and the written press, such as the newspaper Ara, the magazines Caràcters and Tentacles and the cultural web Núvol. They presided the Conseil Européen des Associations de Traducteurs Littéraires (CEATL) and the association of Catalan writers, Associació d’Escriptors en Llengua Catalana (AELC). They have published the short-stories Vents més salvatges (‘Wilder Winds’) and the illustrated albums Gegantíssima and Viure amb la Hilda, awarded with the Apel·les Mestres.

Presented by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality with support from the Film Studies Center.

This event is free and open to the public. Doors open thirty minutes prior to showtime.