Film Categories: Portraits

  • REBIRTH

    “A dance ritual which turns into recreation of the self.” Transformation is a dance ritual. With every move you are born again. With every little step, you cut the umbilical cord. With every turn, you create a new shell.

  • Royal Jelly

    The film begins in abstraction, then we are greeted by a drag queen that we follow down the rabbit hole to meet the menagerie of people that have become her community.

  • Sira

    ‘Sira’, in Arabic, literally translated, means biography. Arabs are a people known for their oral tradition. Through excavated footage and narration, Sira examines the displacement of a family, beginning with the event that catapulted their exodus from Kuwait as a result of the Iraqi invasion.

  • Flash Flood

    Deep within a dream, a cataclysmic flood washes over the planet, and reveals three unique perspectives on gender and identity. The film is animated by volunteer transgender artists and animators from across the globe.

  • HOME MADE

    Home Made is an intimate, contemplative portrait of two queer tattoo artists navigating an industry traditionally dominated by white, straight, cisgender males. The film weaves together the parallel narratives of Jasmine, a shop owner in Philadelphia, and sally, a stick-and-poke artist in Brooklyn, through their trials and triumphs.

  • Father Knows Father Best

    Utilizing damaged film loops and photograms, “Father Knows Father Best” plays off an old found-footage print of the American situation comedy to highlight a dysfunctional family paradigm. Malcolm Goldstein’s experimental violin soundings exploit the atonal dialogue.

  • everyday star

    Everyday states of being and decay are observed through the infinite scope of the cosmos and the restorative light which emanates from it, driving cinematic and photographic impulses.

  • Slumberparty 2018

    Slumberparty 2018 is a remake of a 1984 Super 8 film called Slumberparty made by the Positive Pornographers, a mostly queer collective of Toronto-based artists, activists and sex-workers. Commissioned by A-Space Gallery’s “Developing a Women’s Erotic Language on Film” workshop, Slumberparty was made as a direct intervention in Toronto’s feminist porn debates. They wrote, “we didn’t set out to make a work of art. We set out to make something that might turn us on. Join us for what one previewer called “Mary Poppins’ first lesbian orgy. Slumberparty screened twice in public in 1984 then disappeared until 2016, when the…

  • Emergence

    “Emergence” is a video installation created to counter the violence of blackface in its representation of Blackness. This piece re-asserts the beauty of Blackness and challenges the reductive nature of contemporary Canadian blackface through extreme close-ups of black faces in all their diversity. Shot in extreme slow motion and projected by two projectors at a large scale on two screens, the images appear to be stills at first, but reveal themselves over time to be moving. These parts of lips, noses, eyes, posit the face as a signifying landscape. Serene images contrast with others that depict faces and arms pressed…