Film Categories: Literary/theatre

  • A Small Part Of Me

    A transgender teen prepares to make his acting debut playing a male leading character in a youth play. While rehearsals are in progress, his friends and chosen family band together to help remove him from a difficult living situation. A short documentary about coming out and coming-of-age in a small mountain town in British Columbia.

  • Angela

    This short documentary explores a week in the life of Angela—a roller derby athlete and transgender rights activist in Alberta, Canada. As a jammer for the Calgary All-Stars team, she skates under the name Easy Break Oven and is a role model in the local derby community. She also coaches kids from the small-towns surrounding the city, which is one of the most conservative and religious parts of the country. While preparing for her first derby match of the season, she begins to see her teammates and her life in a new light.

  • 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.

  • Fires of Transformation

    “Fires of Transformation” is a documentary about a unique women’s theatre troupe called VOICE (Violence Overcome in Creative Ensemble), who have collectively written and performed an original play based on their own experiences as survivors of wife assault and other forms of violence against women and children. The film chronicles VOICE’s 1990 National Tour, taking its viewers on an emotional and triumphant journey across Canada. Utilizing interviews, audience discussions, and scenes from VOICE’s powerful play the film celebrates the courage and strength of the women who created it and documents a process of empowerment and transformation.

  • One last night without sadness

    Fleeing the temptations of the city, two young marginals squat a cabin in the heart of the forest. Torn between their desire to live and their impulse to die, they live a love story out of time.

  • JUNK

    It’s a musical! Two gay men, one younger, one considerably older, are offered the contents of a recently deceased man’s dilapidated house in exchange for cleaning it out…items they hope to sell at a Raleigh, NC flea market…only to find nothing there but a mountain of ghostly vintage pornography…and personal memorabilia. As they sort through this debris, discoveries are made…not only of this man but of themselves, their unusual relationship, a generational divide…and loss. “The most offbeat buddy film of 2019 and beyond (as well as a future classic of LGBTQ independent cinema)” – Jed Ryan – Lavender After DarkHi…

  • Battle Cry

    At the oldest-running queer theatre in the world, Toronto’s most cerebral drag queen and “tragicomedienne” Pearle Harbour prepares to take the stage for her new show “Battle Cry: Songs Of Warfare & Gaiety”.

  • Between Two Cinemas Part 1

    For the past thirty years filmmaker/archivist Ross Lipman has cut a winding path between classic international cinema and the American avant-garde. In this riveting but completely unclassifiable work, he looks back at a life in the cinema and an indescribable divide at the heart of it. Part biography, part clip essay, part abstract painting, “Between Two Cinemas” integrates 4K restorations of his old films inside a new documentary/essay linking them. It uncovers previously unseen archival material on Stan Brakhage and Andrei Tarkovsky, and adds new collaborations with artists including visionary experimentalist Bruce Baillie, Jeanne Dielman cinematographer Babette Mangolte, Bela Tarr…

  • Between Two Cinemas Part 2

    For the past thirty years filmmaker/archivist Ross Lipman has cut a winding path between classic international cinema and the American avant-garde. In this riveting but completely unclassifiable work, he looks back at a life in the cinema and an indescribable divide at the heart of it. Part biography, part clip essay, part abstract painting, “Between Two Cinemas” integrates 4K restorations of his old films inside a new documentary/essay linking them. It uncovers previously unseen archival material on Stan Brakhage and Andrei Tarkovsky, and adds new collaborations with artists including visionary experimentalist Bruce Baillie, Jeanne Dielman cinematographer Babette Mangolte, Bela Tarr…