Film Categories: Politics + Policy

  • 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…

  • DP2

    DP2 is the restored version of the film DP (Displaced Person), originally released in 1982. Uniquely melding documentary and contemporary performance art, DP2 is based on the reminiscences of a displaced Ukrainian who spent most of World War II in Nazi Germany and miraculously survived forced labour, concentration camp internment, and near-deportation to Siberia. Intercut with the narrative are dynamic movement sequences shot in a vast glass and marble structure, choreographed and performed by Lily Eng (Canadian Spotlight Artist, Reel Asian International Film Festival, 2011). Eng’s action sequences expand the intellectual and emotional resonances of the narrative, and vice versa. Her…

  • 100 Crushes Chapter 6: They

    “The director’s feelings of envy and resentment of a roommate’s pronoun-of-choice eventually evolve into delight in one simple word. This freedom allows for new embodiments of gender—as beautiful and strange as a unicorn, a pair of wings or a bouquet of roses.” — Inside Out 2014 Toronto LGBT Film Festival

  • SPANKIN

    An anagram of “napkins,” SPANKIN transposes the gay hanky code of the 70s onto contemporary coffee culture. Although humorous in content, SPANKIN is an allegory for hierarchical relations within minority groups, consumerist co-optation of identity, and the collective historical forgetting of repression and resistance. The older man has lived through it, the middle-aged man has heard about it and needs to look it up, while the young man is oblivious. Inspired by the criminalization of homosexual behaviour in Russia, India, Nigeria, and Uganda in 2013, SPANKIN revives the handkerchief code formulated during a similar period of suppression in North America…

  • 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,…

  • 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.

  • Slaughterhouse

    This multi-framed work weaves several inter-connected threads of loss: of land and agriculture, of property and business, through political, social, economic and environmental slaughter. The materials in this archive are gleaned from public and personal sources such as the National Archive of Canada, in the story of a nineteenth century aboriginal woman and land rights activist Nahnebahwequay (1824-65) and more recently organic farmer Michael Schmidt, from excerpts of the Farmer’s Advocate and Family Herald publications 1958-1968, also a trip into the artist’s familial past, and the rise and fall of his family’s slaughterhouse and pork processing plant, Hoffman Meats (1951-81),…

  • Aileron

    A take on the myths of Sisyphus and Ophiuchus. The filmmaker imparts the ending of a motion to a rolling ball and likening it to that of psychosis that can be described as a giant rolling boulder. This “boulder” is symbolized by a medicine ball in the film.

  • Arrested Decay

    A film based on a novella of the same name by the filmmaker. A video poem where nations of dilapidated buildings is the focus and the richest peaceful nation lives in substandard housing and has an inadequate food supply.

  • Dear Tree

    A video poem about clear-cutting forestry and its effects on the air we breathe. The film draws parallels between present day and the renaissance.