Language: English

  • xīn nī 廖芯妮

    xīn nī 廖芯妮 (“understanding you”) is an intimate auto-ethnographic portrait expressed through dance and digital technologies. Liaw engages in intergenerational conversations with her family and community to transform the linguistic divide between her Chinese name and its Hakka translation into a space for healing. Drawing on themes of decolonizing queerness to emphasize self-love and self-curiosity, the work explores both physical and technological attachments. Bodies made up of 3D-rendered cultural objects hold space for the stories of Liaw’s elders, while expanding the growing web of her ancestral knowledge. 

  • Sultana’s reign

    Sultana of New York is a Palestinian drag queen, performer, and artist. “Sultana’s Rein” opens with a conversation with Sultana, as she is being painted by Jordanian artist, RIDIKKULUZ. Reflecting on her journey from Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, to then New York, Sultana tells of the challenges of performing drag in conservative societies, her nostalgia for the glory days and the glamour of Egyptian cinema icons, and her struggle to prove her existence and her self-expression as a performer and artist. She also shares her love of celebration and her everlasting commitment to be true to herself.

  • One Thing I Can Afford

    Louie Sanchez is the performance moniker of Filipinx artist Eirene Cloma. Cloma has recently completed a small collection of songs that broadly reflects on their working-class Filipinx upbringing in North Vancouver and the entanglements of diaspora, interracial relations, and queer desire that texture their everyday experiences. The video for their song One Thing I Can Afford broadly addresses queer and trans friendship in the diaspora, Filipinx masculinities, and everyday enactments of transgenerational care.

  • Building Heaven, Remembering Earth: Confessions of a Fallen Architect

    “Filmmaker Oliver Hockenhull’s shockingly beautiful digital video essay on the philosophy of architecture.” Mari Sasano Building Heaven, Remembering Earth offers a cross-cultural, pan-historical reflection on how the spiritual and intellectual aspirations of self and society are expressed in, and confined by, the language of architecture. “Beginning with a glimpse of Brueghel’s Tower of Babel, this wild and opinionated essay peruses some of the world’s most resonant architectural sites, among them the Pantheon of Rome, Palladio’s Rotunda, Renzo Piano’s New Metropolis, Barcelona for Gaudi, then Mies van der Rohe, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, and Lingaraj Temple in Bhubaneswar, India. Director…

  • God Parasite

    Angels construct the body of Adam, whose mind is then infiltrated by a parasite, altering his being. Experience the loss of human identity through the ethereal nightmare of evolution: the God Parasite.

  • I Believe in the Good of Life

    “I Believe in the Good of Life” celebrates the antics of Toronto drag queen Tawny Le Sabre (Alex McClelland) as the film catalogues the crimes made throughout one summer. Legendary drag artist Keith Cole plays the judge and also Le Sabres co-conspirator in this colourfully absurd film shot on 16mm. Also making cameos: Will Munro, GB Jones and Owen Pallett. A virtual time-capsule of the Toronto queer scene at the turn of the millennium.

  • Golden Streams

    Joel Gibb’s first film shot on super 8 edited by Robert Kennedy layers multiple shots of piss to create a unique grid, a utopic idea of heaven and the beginning of life itself.

  • WAR TIMES

    An exploration of two souls inhabiting bodies from 1940’s Hungary, and the beginning of the digital age. Adoring and loathing one another until full acknowledgment that it should always be this way.

  • Abgad Hawaz

    Robin Riad’s short hand-drawn analogue film ostensibly teaches the pronunciation of the Arabic Alphabet in 28 easy steps. In actuality, the hand-drawn letters were printed using a laser jet printer onto the optical soundtrack of 16mm film, and what you hear in the film is the projector reading the letters, and interpreting them into sound. Riad uses humour to play with and sit with her mother tongue, offering a ‘false’ lesson in pronunciation. A response to a digital form of anti-Arab hate that Riad witnessed online coming out of the genocide in Gaza, Abgad Hawaz is a way for her…

  • Facing the Music

    FACING THE MUSIC:ABOUT A MAN WHO ESCAPED STALIN AND HITLER—AND PUTIN’S RESURRECTION OF BOTH STALIN AND HITLER IN UKRAINE. Wolodymyr joined the Ukrainian partisans in 1939. They were hiding cultural lead- ers who would otherwise be persecuted or murdered by Stalin. After Hitler invaded in 1941, Wolodymyr was abducted to Germany, surviving forced labour and incar- ceration in a concentration camp. Extrapolating from Wolodymyr’s story, the film shows how the atrocities he experi- enced via Stalin and Hitler have been the ‘blueprint’ for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Putin’s Wagner Group mercenaries were named after Hitler’s favourite composer: Richard Wagner. The…