Film Categories: LGBTQ

  • ANCESTRIES

    An anagram of “resistance,” ANCESTRIES is a layered piece that encodes the dialectics of colonialism, de-sexualization, desire and resistance. An Asian is seduced by, and in turn, seduces a Caucasian whilst simultaneously reframing and performing two arias from Samson et Delilah by Camille Saint-Saëns. ANCESTRIES suggests possibilities for resistance vs. outright rejection by having the Asian turn the colonized culture against itself. At the same time, it brackets the Western de-sexualization and feminization of Asian males (and high voices), while simultaneously exemplifying and subverting the stereotypes of submission. The use of male bodies also calls out the worship of hard,…

  • Change Over Time

    Change Over Time is an animated, experimental, personal documentary about the filmmaker’s first year on testosterone from an impressionistic and poetic perspective. The filmmaker asks himself the questions, what kind of man will I become? What emotional and soul changes will I experience during this time? The result is a distilled, evocative poem of Ewan’s musings on loss, love, and change through the use of stop-motion and digital animation, still photography, and time-lapse cinematography. Change Over Time will leave viewers with the wave of the filmmaker’s experiences washing over them.

  • Angst

    The story of the exquisite torture suffered by high school students on a daily basis. Our hero is both sullen and gay. He feels isolated and alienated but he is not alone – they’re all caught up in a big daisy chain of unrequited love and teen trauma.

  • 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.

  • G/R/E/A/S/E

    What the hell is G/R/E/A/S/E? … a handmade décollage film / Vinyl and Celluloid Party / the last piece of the “Film Quartet” trilogy [with FILM QUARTET / POLYFRAME (2006-2008) & KINOSTURM KUBELKA / 16 variaciones (2009)] / a deconstruction / Sandy / Danny / Sanny / Dandy / … both faces at the same frame? / […] ? […] / A new (sub)versions film… all from the original Grease (1978) / a Re-Play [to – with] Grease? / A Musical? / Found Footage Film ? Appropriationism / Experimental Cinema must be serious only? / Inspired by Dziga Vertov, Mimmo…

  • 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…

  • Performing Girl

    Performing Girl is a short documentary about D’Lo, a queer, transgender, Tamil Sri Lankan American actor, writer, director and comic who got his start at age 11, performing for his family and classmates in the desert town of Lancaster, CA. Animations, home movies, and family snapshots paint the portrait of his personality. In interviews and clips from his performances, D’Lo and his parents explain how his identity and their relationship has changed over the last twenty years.

  • A MOOR

    A MOOR – (or a “room” inverted) synthesizes the multiple meanings of securing, uncultivated land, and an ethnic population in its portraits of Caucasian sex tourists who blur into one another through the POV of an unheard and unseen Asian escort. The dynamics of power and race revealed through the clients’ speech and not allowing the Asian character that forms the core of the film to be seen or heard.

  • BLISSED

    The unspoken issue of LGBT domestic violence becomes an allegory for LGBT racial dynamics. Drawing inspiration from the claustrophobic tensions of Tennessee Williams, it distills the undertones between classes in society, the plight of immigrants in Canada, the double-edge of charity, and the transference of violence from people’s fetish and fear.

  • CONTENTUS

    CONTENTUS takes its cue from the meanings of the (latin) word – to strain with exertion, to hold together; in which three parallel stories intersect in a contemporary allegory of labor, loneliness, prejudice, power and place. Connected by isolation, everyday cruelties and unheard stories, the underrepresented characters straddle the metaphoric and the real. An unseen Asian escort’s clientele of Caucasian sex tourists blur into one another, domestic tensions and violence of a professional man and his young live-in immigrant lover, and an encounter between a young banker and his older homeless doppelgänger in a city meridian populated by High Finance…