Film Format: Digital File

  • 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.

  • Pratersauna – The final round

    Pratersauna The final round Vienna! That is Sissi, the Opera, Lipizzaner and Sacher Cake. (Is it really just this?) Or is there more? Worldknown DJs like Apparat, Oliver Koletzki, Acid Pauli or Kerri Chandler had a special relation to this city and it wasn’t because of the Opera and the beautiful horeses in Vienna. After seven glorious years, one of the most influential clubs, the Pratersauna, closed its doors in Vienna. No other club had such a massive influence that changed the techno party scene in the city. Other clubs worked differently than the Pratersauna. For many people the Pratersauna…

  • Primary Colours

    A cine-poem by Sudanese-Canadian artist Roua Aljied, aka Philosi-fire, about the realities of domestic violence and how each step a woman takes is a new colour to paint on the canvass of her life. Created in partnership with Women in International Security Canada and the 16 Days of Activism Campaign in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and performed live for the 2016 International Women’s Day ceremonies in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

  • Plus One

    The singles table at a wedding is rarely a place anyone stays a moment longer than they have to, but Trish and Calvin have their reasons: she doesn’t want to run into an army of ex-girlfriends, and he’s depressed at the lack of eligible men among the wedding attendees. Their mutual misery forces a bond, and the two strangers quickly become allies in dance floor avoidance. A comic and highly contemporary exploration of thirtysomething singledom, Plus One offers up an all-too-rare romance where queer boy meets queer girl.

  • Love Letter Rescue Squad

    “Our history was disappearing as quickly as we were making it.” With that realization, Deborah Edel and Joan Nestle co-founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the world’s largest collection of materials by and about lesbians. More than 40 years later, Deb must consider the future of the collection.

  • Parker

    A couple gets into a tiff on the way home from a social event, that is only resolved when they realize they were both behaving out of mis-placed jealousy.

  • FU377

    Basic dignity of queer people in India is under attack, yet again. The scorching IPC Section 377 is re-unleashed to police to criminalise “gay sex” in India. While the law and the Supreme Court dated themselves back a few hundred years, an adorable Indian mother has her knowledge of “gay sex” in mint condition, wheeling out a tidbit or two for her heartbroken queer daughter in an effort to cheer her up. The pair are shocked into action by the Supreme Court’s latest rejection.

  • Traje de Luces | Suit of Lights

    Traje de Luces | Suit of Lights is an expressive documentary composed with footage of a Spanish bullfight, that iconic imagery of highly decorated masculinity and violence masked as nationalism. The footage was drawn from Jacques Madvo Collection material filmed in Spain between 1976-1978. Madvo shot this footage at a time when Spain began its difficult and flawed transition to democracy in the years following dictator Francisco Franco’s death in 1975. The film consists of 16mm footage that has been decayed in soil, contact-printed and laboriously re-photographed and these abstractions of light and darkness ground the inquiry surrounding why citizens…

  • The Human Condition

    Ideas about how we live in the world as humans, the difficulties faced, the conditions of our brief existence, accompany us consciously or unconsciously, overtly or subliminally as we go about our daily lives. The video quotes images from art and film and texts from various philosophies to conjure the fraught and beautiful condition of being alive. The human condition has been thought, written about, and imaged throughout history: Aristotle, Lucretius, Hobbes, Arendt, Magritte – among others. This video samples some of the thoughts and images that swirl around us and through us as we live conditionally embodied in the…