Film Categories: sexuality

  • Every Day Burns

    Award winning pole dancer, Sada Velasquez, addresses the familial and social stigma she must overcome in order to pursue her passion for dance. Everyday Burns is a short documentary exploring one artist’s journey towards self expression and community empowerment. Every day Sada overcomes physical limitations, personal doubts and moral perceptions of others in order to create a safe space for folks to explore their sensual freedom.

  • Queer Isolation

    Queer Isolation is an award-winning short drama produced for the Barrie Film Festival’s Youth Virtual Media Arts Program about Noelle, a young Vietnamese-Canadian transgender woman forced back into the closet when she moves back in with her parents after losing her job due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Image description: Hands hold a series of Polaroid photos in muted colours.

  • The Way We Are

    “The Way We Are” shares excerpts of stories from audio interviews with 4 queer Asian women living in Toronto: Katherine Chun, Wenda Li, Tamai Kobayashi, and Nancy Seto. Told in the present-tense, these stories are arranged in a way that explores the past as the present, and in doing so, immersing viewers into the real-lived experiences from a different generation. This film was inspired by the intimacy of looking through a photo album with loved ones; there is something nostalgic about the materiality of handling photographs, especially in this digital era where images are so increasingly ubiquitous. The act of…

  • Green and Red, But Terracotta Red

    We are looking through the mirror of time, into distorted memories, while several narrators tell us about the most vivid colours in their dreams. The film consists of a collage of 16mm found footage that I further processed and decayed using a gentle combination of bleaching techniques. This process allowed me to partially lift the emulsion from the film base and re-shift it and re-position it by hand. Faces are warped, homes collapse, memories fade and blur.

  • Fluid Bound

    An experimental gender fluid, mestize-Indigenous film that uses text, sound design, crude animation, and bondage rope to meditate on the complex, generations-old relationships and battles between our skin and our souls.

  • Toe the Line

    TOE THE LINE follows Gloria Chau, a closeted teenage hockey player. When she’s not on the ice, she’s got a guitar in her hands and a snapback on her head. Her mother Nancy, a stylish Hong Kong woman, spends sleepless nights worrying about Gloria’s failing grades. Gloria is torn between two worlds: the fun but cutthroat world of hockey where she gets to be loud and proud in her queerness, and the one at home where she’s a recluse, using music to cope with being forced into becoming someone she’s not. Underlying these tensions is a deep racial divide. She…

  • Contents under Pressure

    An anxious young party-goer finds love at a party, but after committing a party faux pas, is destroyed in a washing machine accident. From here, the project pivots, self-conscious and needing to recast its hero, who quickly has an existential crisis (“what’s my motivation?”). A poetic, quirky, singular meditation on identity and personal history, populated with the beautiful vistas of Atlantic Canada.

  • Ever Wanting (for Margaret Chung)

    Inspired by San Francisco’s first Chinese American female physician, this film envisions the euphoria and despair of Margaret Chung and her insatiable desire for women and celebrity through her forays into drugs, sapphic surgeries, and queer flights of fancy. Image description: A black-and-white archival image toned warm purple, showing a woman dancing with arms raised to the side and skirt flared out in a circle.

  • Queering Yoga

    Queering Yoga tells the story of 6 Queer/Trans/QTPOC yoga teachers and their personal stories of healing, transformation, and yoga journey. Themes explored include: What is the intersection of Queer, Trans, and QTPOC identities and yoga? What does empowered and embodied visibility look like for the Queer, Trans, and QTPOC communities? What does it mean to decolonize one’s yoga practice and why is this important? Queering Yoga embraces an intersectional lens to explore identity, personal, and community transformation. The film positions Queer/Trans/QTPOC yoga teachers as important voices and leaders in current day yoga conversations and spaces committed to ending racism, homophobia,…

  • Heavy Petting

    A lonely young woman scrambling to fill the void left by a missing household pet forges a strange and tenuous bond with an unexpected visitor role-playing in a cat costume. When the animal returns, the visitor is discarded and returns to life of profound solitude and invisibility, which inspires a macabre test of their social obscurity.