Film Categories: Activism + Protest

  • We Are Animals

    In this alternate-history fable set in the 1980’s AIDS Crisis, a closeted young man is thrust into the midst of an anti-government coup and finds that the animal within is stronger than the monsters that oppress.

  • Submerged Queer Spaces

    Submerged Queer Spaces is a documentary feature that examines queer history through an approach of urban archeology. Our cameras look at surviving architectural details of old haunts as if unearthing ancient monuments. As San Francisco grew and gentrified, communities changed, shifted, and were displaced. Bars, restaurants, parks, alleys, bathhouses, and other gathering spots of the queer community were remodeled, repurposed, rebuilt, or destroyed. Submerged Queer Spaces looks at the architectural remains of historic sites and buildings in San Francisco. Eight interview subjects recount firsthand experiences in these lost environs. Gerald Fabien experienced gay San Francisco before WWII, and tells tales…

  • Finding a Place to Sleep

    Based on stories my grandmother told me, I re-imagine while working as a cleaner the experiences of my ancestors during the Holodomor (forced famine) in Ukraine during the Stalinist-Soviet era. The “film” image is re-invented through digital video to enact a sense of ambiguity between authenticity and fiction, as can also be present in the act of oral storytelling. This is one chapter in “Stories for a Future Generation,” a series of shorts which together tell the stories of my family’s and my own migrations, and the inter-generational impacts of those upon our lives and on those of our family’s…

  • PACED

    By exploring the different meanings of pace (as speed, as measure, as constraint), PACED investigates the twin paradoxes of modern nomadism: alienation from increasing connectivity, and the constant movement of everyday life that keeps returning one back to the same place. Using non-repeating 10-second clips (shot primarily with a camera phone) which flicker across 5 split screens, PACED both collides and regulates the movement and semantic interaction of the visuals and music in accordance to an internal structure to comment on how urbanism has divorced its residents from the natural, and how its rituals and veneer distract from its cruelty…

  • NORTH SOUTH

    Reworking recently rediscovered 15-year-old footage, NORTH SOUTH is a personal and political allegory of freedom and repression in Singapore. It draws an analogy between bipolar-altered reality to life in a prosperous fascist regime (the bridge it was filmed on was a then newly-constructed link between the state university and an army officer camp). NORTH SOUTH was an experiment in the expressiveness of form and rejection of over-determined Hollywood / social realist narrative taught in Singapore. Central to its structure and intent was the foregrounding of typically background elements (montage and music) to explore their expressive potential, as well as the…

  • BROKEN ANGEL (GEBROCHENGEL)

    In Frankfurt near St. Peter’s church on Klaus-Mann-Platz, there is a memorial with an angel sculpture (aka Frankfurter Engel) for the homosexual men and women persecuted and murdered during the Third Reich. 2013 was a tumultuous year for LGBT rights like the spike in hate crimes in the U.S. post-DOMA, and passing of anti-gay legislation worldwide (most notably Russia and India). On 6 May 2013, the anniversary of Marlene Dietrich’s death and 80th year past the Third Reich, Stephen explores the historical and ongoing queer struggle and gilded apology of monuments in a guerilla performance by colliding the Frankfurter Engel…

  • Death Of A Bathhouse

    Combining footage from the final days of St. Marc’s Spa with interviews from Toronto artists Sky Gilbert, Keith Cole, Brad Fraser, Drasko Bogdanovic and Shane MacKinnon, The Reading Salon looks at one of Toronto’s longest running bathhouses through the lens of the artist.

  • Trans Lives Matter! Justice for Islan Nettles

    A powerful and intensely moving document of a community vigil for Islan Nettles, a transgender Womyn of Colour, concerning her spirit and life. Because the personal is political. Because the brutal and increasing attacks on Trans Womyn of Color are outrageous and their victimization causes outrage. Because healing and action tighten our fists and boom our voices. Islan’s murder was a hate crime, she was only 21. Her vigil was held at Jackie Robinson Park in Harlem, steps away from where she was murdered. This endeavour captured the love and support that the community brought to sustain each other and…

  • In the Hollow

    In May 1988, girlfriends Claudia Brenner and Rebecca Wight were attacked while hiking the Appalachian Trail by a ‘mountain man’ named Stephen Roy Carr. IN THE HOLLOW tells the story of the shooting, Wight’s death, and Brenner’s desperate survival (and later transformation into an advocate for hate crime legislation in the U.S.) as she returns to the trail for the first time since the shooting.  The film combines documentary and narrative film elements, using the actual locations on the trail and dramatizations written by Claudia Brenner and director/screenwriter Austin Bunn based on her testimony. The film follows Brenner as she…

  • Gulf

    This film was shot on the north shore of Cuba looking towards the Gulf of Mexico, just months before 4.9 million barrels of oil was spilled by Deepwater Horizon between April 20-July 15, 2010. Wave patterns fill the frame, tearing apart the filmstrip itself. Selected Screenings: Berwick FIlm & Media Arts Festival, 2017 (Berwick-on-Tweed, UK)