Film Categories: LGBTQ

  • Outside The Ring

    Through the lens of a unique violence recovery program in Toronto, this documentary provides a glimpse into the lives of women and transgendered survivors of violence and the impact Boxing has had in their healing. The film follows the ways in which participants challenge social constructs that dictate that women must not experience their own feelings of aggression. The Toronto Newsgirls Boxing Club is the first all-women’s boxing club in North America. In 2007, a small group of women boxers active in social justice created Shape Your Life, a project designed for women and trans survivors of violence. The goal…

  • Excess Is What I Came For

    A beat-driven, flesh-filled document of the nocturnal paradise that was “Dyke Night” at the Boom Boom Room in Toronto.

  • 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…

  • Exposure

    “Exposure” is an experimental documentary that explores issues of race, sexuality and cultural identity. A dialogue between two lesbians of colour (Japanese-Canadian and Afro-Caribbean women) is intercut with photographs, texts, paintings and voice-over. Available on DVD on the compilation “Artist Spotlight Series: Michelle Mohabeer.”

  • Mathematics of a Lesbian Kiss

    Shot entirely on iPhones 5S and 5C, in this non-linear narrative two women contemplate the similarities between a lesbian bar in San Jose, Costa Rica and their experiences of the dyke bar scene in Toronto decades earlier.

  • untitled (eleven years)

    A posthumous coming out film diary to my mom. Shot October 11, 1988, Bethel Memorial Park, Detroit.

  • Famous Diamonds

    A kaleidoscopic search for desire trapped inside a volcano. Famous Diamonds is a short film that studies lies, love, and desire by weaving together a diary narrative and an exploding icon. Composed of various image-making techniques, Famous Diamonds is a hand-painted, hand-processed tour of the dissolution of one’s internal image of desire.

  • Spermwhore

    This short film is a queer, feminist and experimental work that began in 2009 and came to fruition in the spring of 2013. Spermwhore is a queer experimental film about unwanted childlessness in a world where normative heterosexual relationships dictate who can become parents and in what way. When it comes to reproduction our merciless bodies reduce us to merely a set sex or given gender. But the longing for children is not limited to our bodies, and the possibility of pregnancy can be gifted, shared and undertaken together.

  • Queer Ecologies

    Queer Ecologies is a diary style, video text piece, made up of one or two sentence installments. Instead of addressing “Dear Diary,” or God, the writer directs her internal musings to a Mushroom, or the larger organism that a mushroom springs from, a Mycelium. While the writer expresses her personal struggles and misgivings about the human condition, she compares her experiences to the supernatural life of the mushroom species. The language is both scientific and poetic.

  • Last Vestiges

    Aging stripper Eddy isn’t the superstar he once was. The patrons are bored with him, his lap dance regulars are blowing him off, and he’s coping with it all by self-medicating with drugs and booze. During a night of harsh rejections, Eddy notices an elderly man staring at him from across the club. Desperate for attention and money, Eddy offers the man a dance. But once the two are alone in a private booth, things take an unexpected turn.