Film Categories: Oral Histories

  • seeds are meant to disperse

    seeds are meant to disperse (2015-ongoing) is an ongoing project where I grow, save and share seeds. Seeds take time to grow, to harvest, to prepare, and to share—an act that I see as gift as much as necessity and survival. As such, the seeds are offered as trade or gift, in an attempt to encourage and support alternative systems of exchange. As the seeds are gifted and grown they are meant to help others imagine building a world different from the trajectory it is currently on. As an ongoing and forever growing project, I continue to adapt and rethink…

  • DHPG Mon Amour

    A Super-8, home-style movie which explores the radical advances made by PWA’s (People With AIDS), in developing their own health care. Focusing precisely on the ordinary minutiae of David Conover and Joe Walsh’s daily life, DHPG Mon Amour shows the struggle for self-determination and control over one’s own body and resonates on an intimate and more broadly political level. DHPG Mon Amour was featured at the 1990 New Directors Series at the Museum of Modern Art and The Semaine de la Critique at the Cannes Film Festival. The film has been exhibited at festivals, museums and theaters throughout the U.S.,…

  • The Williamsburg Houses

    This film gazes into the architecture and lives of the occupants of one of the most ambitious public housing projects ever built in the US. Exploring the remains of a utopian design in contemporary context, we are immersed in the life of a building and a community.

  • Midnight at the Continental

    Toronto, 1955. In the heart of Chinatown, a new bar opens: The Continental. It’s dark, grimy, and attracts an unusual clientele. Local tabloids scream in 20-point font: “Sapphos overflow Chinatown!” The bar becomes the meeting place for two of Toronto’s marginalized communities: Chinese-Canadian men and lesbians living “the life” full time. Recounting this forgotten piece of Toronto queer history, artists Hortie and Reynolds tell the story of Toronto’s first long-standing lesbian bar using original shadow puppets, overhead projector animation and archival images. Pull a stool up to the bar and watch lesbians and Chinese men stand side by side, battling…

  • Whatever Happened to Jackie Shane?

    Toronto, 1963. Jackie Shane – a black, queer, soul-singing, flamboyant Nashville-born, Toronto-based musician – had a hit song on the charts. The song was a sensation, and with the lyrics “Tell her that I’m happy, tell her that’s I’m gay; tell her I wouldn’t have it any other way”, it was also an underground gay anthem. But before being able to fully enjoy the fruits of this success, Jackie suddenly disappeared. Uncovering this forgotten piece of Toronto queer music history, artists Hortie and Reynolds recreate Jackie’s story using original shadow puppets, overhead animation and stop motion techniques. Follow Jackie through…

  • this year, here

    A contemplation on queer histories, explored through memories of a family cottage.

  • Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots

    Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots reworks Jacques Madvo’s Countries & People: Venezuela to explore labour and migration. Taking the final words of the film’s voice-over as a starting point, Soy un ser cuyas raíces // I am a being whose roots pairs Madvo’s film footage with a text-based conversation with young Venezuelan literature scholar and language teacher Angel Said Dominguez Pinto. Dominguez Pinto relocated to Panama in 2014 to make a living teaching English, Spanish & German in Panama City after Venezuela’s economic collapse. Over e-mail, we co-authored a conversational text, exploring migration,…

  • Sex, Politics & Sticky Rice

    Protests, potlucks, and three-ways are just the “tip of the rice bowl” for five Asian American lesbians recounting their adventures in sex, love, and queer activism. They were among the first generation of out Asian Pacific Islander queer activists in the San Francisco Bay Area. While Crystal Jang falls hard for her PE teacher, Gisele Pohan’s immigrant father dares her to join the 1979 Gay & Lesbian March on Washington. Helen Zia and Lia Shigemura keep a “chart” of the various hook ups and break ups. Zee Wong discovers the joys of lesbian sex in her first girl-on-girl menage a…

  • aw • rah • nyoosh

    A documentary filmmaker attempts to imagine, along with his father, his grandmother’s experience at a labor camp during the holocaust. As they get drawn into a world of the grandmother’s romance, they begin to lose control of their imaginations. “The son installs the camera, the father stands on the sofa. They are preparing to begin an intergenerational dialogue based on the newspaper that their mother and grandmother, Sari, held in the 40s, during his deportation. aw • rah • nyoosh [aranyos] , from Ben Neufeld, takes time to set up; the viewer takes time to understand the contract that the…

  • 8401

    8401 is a moving-image and light landscape painting depicting a multi-layered, fragmented view of Villa Grimaldi in Santiago, Chile. Now a memorial park, Villa Grimaldi was a clandestine detention, torture and extermination centre during the Pinochet regime (1973-90). The image is built of hundreds of images extracted from five years of Google Street Views of the address and site, Avenida José Arrieta 8401.The sound is composed of fifteen audio loops of ambient sound and voice, deconstructed from a field recording gathered during a 2016 tour of the facility. A multitude of shifting perspectives give the impression both of deprioritizing time…