Film Categories: Race + Ethnicity

  • 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…

  • Looking for Jiro

    “Looking for Jiro” explores the hidden dimensions of same sex intimacy for Japanese Americans incarcerated by the US government during World War II. This experimental performance video is inspired by Jiro Onuma, a gay Issei (immigrant) who was imprisoned at Topaz concentration camp in central Utah. He worked in the prison mess hall and was also an avid fan of homoerotic male physique magazines. How did this dandy gay bachelor from San Francisco survive the isolation, humiliation, and homophobia of imprisonment? This queer musical mash-up video features drag king performance, US propaganda footage, muscle building, and homoerotic bread making. This…

  • 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…

  • Warning Shot

    One death. Three versions of the crime. James H. Wakasa, a 63-year-old Japanese American bachelor, was shot to death by military police at Topaz concentration camp during World War II. Was it justifiable homicide, an accidental fatality, or second-degree murder? The press said he was trying to escape, the shooter claimed it was a warning shot, the case file suggests he was killed while walking a dog. This experimental film essay uses the “Rashomon effect” to juxtapose the conflicting accounts detailing the circumstances and cause of Wakasa’s untimely death. Part of the Queer Camp Trilogy.

  • Semiotics of Sab

    This experimental film essay explores the poetics of identity through an oblique portrait of gay Japanese American actor Sab Shimono. For more than five decades, Shimono has performed on stage and screen in over 150 roles as warlords, bus boys, and businessmen. Shimono asks, “How is it that we know who we are?” Recalling early structuralist works by Hollis Frampton and Martha Rosler, Semiotics of Sab displays the grammatology of queer Asian American masculinity through conflicting lexicons of race, representation, and selfhood.

  • Missed Connections

    Two strangers meet and form a bond at a festival, but they forget to exchange contact info. As they search for one another in the real world, their posts go viral, as they navigate their careers, lives, and societyʼs expectations of them as Black, female, and transgender. LGBT love story. Audience Award for Best Short, TranScreen Amsterdam Transgender Film Festival, 2019

  • 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,…

  • The Exile (Pituvahalaya)

    Shot improvisationally in 2010, shortly after the end of the Sri Lankan civil war, this film takes a lyrical approach to examining recent history and the process of reconstruction in the post-war era. The visions of an exile are carried through an immoral silence, to an end both dubious and bittersweet. World premiere at 64th Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, 2018

  • Preslee

    Jo seeks consolation at a costume party after coming out as bi-sexual to her family during Elvis karaoke.

  • 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…