Film Categories: Race + Ethnicity

everyday star

Everyday states of being and decay are observed through the infinite scope of the cosmos and the restorative light which emanates from it, driving cinematic and photographic impulses.
Cherry Cola

After Ryan receives an abrupt message ending his two year relationship, he and his fellow drag sister, Nick, partake on a drunken adventure for resolution. Moving through the city with night as their fuel, both queens are forced to reflect on the life they live, and the people who can’t seem to keep up.
Emergence

“Emergence” is a video installation created to counter the violence of blackface in its representation of Blackness. This piece re-asserts the beauty of Blackness and challenges the reductive nature of contemporary Canadian blackface through extreme close-ups of black faces in all their diversity. Shot in extreme slow motion and projected by two projectors at a large scale on two screens, the images appear to be stills at first, but reveal themselves over time to be moving. These parts of lips, noses, eyes, posit the face as a signifying landscape. Serene images contrast with others that depict faces and arms pressed…
Lionhood

A portrait of two teenaged hockey players which explores the intensity of adolescence – a time of unrestrained physicality and surging hormones, resulting in unchecked impulses and unseen emotions.
Ode to the Nine

“Ode to the Nine” is influenced by video artist Jon Rafman. His work “9-Eyes” and “You, the World and I” inspired the filmmaker to make this video piece. This short experimental video allows the filmmaker to ponder the relevance of the moving image and what impacts it has on the Native experience of the past, present and future.
Stripped

Forget everything you heard and enter the world that many know of but know very little about. STRIPPED is the personal, untold story of Phylicia Carty, also known as Mz Lady Ice, whose life took her in the direction of becoming one of the most revolutionary urban exotic dancers in the Toronto adult entertainment industry. The enticing documentary showcases the struggles and triumphs that come with being a female stripper in a contemporary world that is now gaining mainstream acceptance. A multi-award winning short film, STRIPPED has received a total of 4 awards, 8 nominations and 3 official selections in…
我的女儿 DAUGHTER

DAUGHTER explores an immigrant mother’s pain and worry about her transgender daughter and examines the perspective of a mother who may not understand her daughter, but cares for her deeply. The film celebrates transgender resistance, gender non-normativity, and the strength of the immigrant family across language and cultural boundaries.
Untitled

A performance film consisting of a string of five slow motion portraits of a young woman. Each portrait varies in length and gesture as her myriad expressions invite our gaze. With each action performed in dead silence, stretched to the limits of voyeuristic levels of comfort, the simple act of looking is made fragile. A curious exchange is established between spectator, creator, and subject through a careful appropriation and reframing of social media conventions and advertising iconography transposed into a cinematic space—pointing to a cycle of regressive media consumption.
BLU In YOU

Walter Benjamin suggests that film is comparable to surgery, the instrument allowing the operator to penetrate the body of the subject while, paradoxically, maintaining his or her distance. This statement self-reflexively sets up the female spectator at the helm of the art-installation opening of Blu in You—an eloquent essayist film with visual conversations that dissects historical and contemporary representations of the black female body, sexuality and subjectivity. The female spectator (Melanie Smith), views the staged art installation conversations between visual arts curator (Andrea Fatona) and writer (Nalo Hopkinson). The conversations begin with a cultural history of violence, ethnographic display and…
Framing Agnes (short)

In the late 1950s, a woman named Agnes approached the UCLA Medical Center seeking sex reassignment surgery. Her story was long considered to be exceptional and singular until never-before-seen case files of other patients were found in 2017. Watch as preeminent trans culture-makers of our time breathe new life into those who redefined gender in the midcentury. Starring Zackary Drucker (Transparent), Angelica Ross (Pose), Silas Howard (By Hook or By Crook), and Max Wolf Valerio (The Testosterone Files). “An incredible film that transforms the most difficult of archives and shows us critical trans study in action, on screen—I will be…