Film Categories: Politics + Policy

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • 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

  • Midnight at the Continental

    Toronto, 1955. In the heart of Chinatown, a new bar opens: The Continental. It’s dark, grimy, and attracts an unusual clientele. Local tabloids scream in 20-point font: “Sapphos overflow Chinatown!” The bar becomes the meeting place for two of Toronto’s marginalized communities: Chinese-Canadian men and lesbians living “the life” full time. Recounting this forgotten piece of Toronto queer history, artists Hortie and Reynolds tell the story of Toronto’s first long-standing lesbian bar using original shadow puppets, overhead projector animation and archival images. Pull a stool up to the bar and watch lesbians and Chinese men stand side by side, battling…

  • Meet Me Under the Clock

    “Meet Me Under the Clock” explores a little-known time in Toronto’s LGBTQ history when an underground Halloween tradition became an annual confrontation between an invisible gay community and a fascinated, often hateful public. “Meet Me Under the Clock” tells the story of Halloween at the St Charles Tavern, a Yonge Street gay bar, throughout the 1970s. Each year, thousands of straight spectators would gather to throw eggs and jeer at the men attending the bar’s annual drag party. This unknown Toronto history highlights the role that LGBTQ spaces play in providing sanctuary and community, the complicated relationship between the LGBTQ…

  • Leavings

    The end of life comes for one half of a long term love relationship. “Leavings” is about the last sacred moments alone together before authorities, family and friends learn of the death. It portrays a tender offering that begins to deal with the messy remains of a vessel so well known as to have been studied intimately.

  • The Uphill Battle: The Cost of Raising a Champion

    Karate and the Olympics: Who Will Represent Canada in 2020? This documentary highlights the difficulties experienced in creating champions in Ontario. For the past 20 years athletes have been faced with hardships created by stringent rules, underfunding, and a complete lack of understanding from “higher-ups.” Today karate faces a real challenge: How do we make the transition from an amateur sport to a professionally organized industry with an environment for raising true champions? We attempt to cover this issue in depth with interviews with people who are directly involved. “The Uphill Battle” is required viewing for anyone who believes karate…