Rex vs. Singh
In 1915, two Sikh mill-workers, Dalip Singh and Naina Singh, were entrapped by undercover cops and accused of sodomy. Their story becomes a fascinating case study of Vancouver power relations: how police corruption, racism, homophobia, and a covert "whites-only" immigration policy, conspired to maintain the status quo of this colonial port city. Told in four parts, by three separate directors, the film is a hybrid of film forms including drama, documentary and musical.
Also Directed by John Greyson
Freely drawing from a variety of film genres, including musicals, the sudsy melodramas and documentaries and combing them with a free-flowing narrative and bright pop-art sensibilities, this hard-hitting experimental romp from Canadian filmmaker John Greyson packs a political wallop while satirically comparing and contrasting the issues of censorship and circumcision. The tale centers on the exploits of three homosexuals named Peter. Peter Koosens is obsessed with the semi-scandalous behavior of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau while college student Peter Cort, ponders the significance and necessity of male circumcision. Peter Denham is an artist who seduces the other two and freely borrows from their work to make something of his own. Their exploits land the trio in prison after an operatic number (the police sing songs adapted from Bizet's Carmen).
"An experimental documentary about the violent closing of the first Queer Sarajevo Festival. Straddling truth and fiction, the film interweaves the courageous story of the four festival organizers with an apocryphal essay by Susan Sontag - about cover versions of "bird" songs - that pushes the limits of liberal solidarity."
On April 30th, 2004, York student and peace activist Dan Freeman-Maloy was suspended for 3 years for using a megaphone on campus. In a protest two weeks later, an impromptu megaphone choir performed. The composition "Motet for Amplified Voices", with over 50 megaphones.
Experimental musical based on a factual incident, the beating to death of a homosexual man in Toronto, 1985, by five teenagers.
A mystery man brings together a group of dead, gay artists to investigate a police response to the dilema of wash-room sex in Toronto. The artists have seven days in which to report on the ethics of police tactics. The artists infiltrate the police only to discover that they themselves are under surveillance as a political subversive group. The artists explore and report on the evolution of toilets and wash-room behavior.
Kipling is touring North America, hoping to recruit boy scouts, and he is trailed undercover by a CIA-TV reporter. Meanwhile, a travel agent, watching a film during his lunchbreak, meets Kipling - all three are arrested and the journalist is fired.
Irony abounds in this split screen depiction of unjustified imprisonment. Greyson traces Jean Genet’s “Un Chant d’Amour”, with his own story of penguins held within the stone confines of the film farm barnyard. Made at Phil Hoffman's Film Farm, 2009.
On Aug 16, 2013, Canadian filmmaker John Greyson and Palestinian-Canadian doctor Tarek Loubani were detained without charges in Cairo's Tora Prison. During their 50-day detention, John created these flash cards as a diary of their experiences. Following an international grassroots campaign, they were released on October 7, and returned to Canada on October 13. This video is dedicated to the many who spoke out for their release, and for the many who are still behind bars.
The ghost of "patient zero", who allegedly first brought AIDS to North America - materialises and tries to contact old friends. Meanwhile, the Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton, who drank from the Fountain of Youth and now works as Chief Taxidermist at the Toronto Natural history Museum, is trying to organise an exhibition about the disease for the museum's "Hall of Contagion".
A poem about sex work in the age of COVID to the music of Handel. Let me weep over my cruel fate, and let me sigh for liberty.
Also Directed by Richard Fung
In 1984, Richard Fung released his seminal first documentary Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Asians. Featuring 14 women and men in Toronto of South, East and Southeast Asian backgrounds, Orientations was the first documentary to explore the experiences and perspectives of queer Asians in North America. Capturing pivotal moments in Toronto’s history, it presents an intimate portrait of the texture of gay live and politics at that time. Re:Orientations revisits seven of the original participants as they see anew the footage of their younger selves, and reflect on their lives and all that has changed over the intervening three decades. Their interviews are deepened and contextualized by conversations with six younger queer and trans activists, scholars and artists.
In a courageous, straight into the camera, monologue the film maker tells us what it's like to be the school fag. The only one that is out about being gay in a small town high school.
This video focuses on the experiences of four Asian men. Each person is in a different stage of HIV infection and each has significant experiences with various issues surrounding the disease. The interviews focus on the personal, the therapeutic, the medical and the political with HIV as a constant reference throughout.
Jehad Aliweiwi is a Palestinian Canadian who lives in Toronto but regularly returns to visit his family in Hebron. Rendered on two screens, Jehad in Motion is a double portrait both of the man and of the two cities he calls home. In Hebron, Jehad takes us to the old market where Jewish settlers have colonized the upper stories forcing Palestinians to build a horizontal fence to protect themselves. In Toronto, we walk around Thorncliffe Park where he works providing services in one of the city’s key neighbourhoods for newly arrived immigrants. In Hebron, he celebrates his sister’s wedding at a feast for one thousand people. In Toronto, he cooks at a Passover Seder for peace. Jehad synthesizes the challenges and possibilities in these two very different but overlapping worlds. Jehad in Motion ruminates on diaspora, urban space, and the interpenetration of politics and cultures. It is also an intervention into the practices of documentary media, portraiture and installation art.
Dirty Laundry speculates upon the buried narratives of gender and sexuality in Chinese-Canadian history of the 19th century, when Chinese communities were almost exclusively male. A story about a chance late-night encounter between a steward and a passenger on a train interweaves with documentary interviews with historians and writers and historical documents brought to life. The tape poses nagging questions about the personal and political stakes in the writing of history and in our interpretations of the past.
In the fall of 1986, Richard Fung made his first visit to his father's birthplace, a village in southern Guangdong, China. This experimental documentary examines the way children of immigrants relate to the land of their parents, and focuses on the ongoing subjective construction of history and memory. The Way to My Father's Village juxtaposes the son's search for his own historical roots, and his father's avoidance of his cultural heritage.
Islands is an experimental video that deconstructs a film by John Huston to comment on the Caribbean‚s relationship to the cinematic image. A story of unrequited love by a shipwrecked American marine (Robert Mitchum) for an Irish nun (Deborah Kerr), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison is set in 1944 in the Pacific, but is shot in 1956 in Tobago using Trinidadian Chinese extras to portray Japanese soldiers. The artist’s uncle Clive is one such extra.
With a travel ban in place, Richard and his partner Tim, are stranded as the only guests in a small riad in the Dades Valley in southeast Morocco.
My Mother's Place is an experimental documentary focusing on the artist's mother, a third-generation Chinese-Trinidadian who at 80 still has vivid memories of a history lost or quickly disappearing. She conveys these with a storytelling style and a frankness that is distinctly West Indian. A tape about memory, oral history, and autobiography, My Mother's Place interweaves interviews, personal narrative, home movies, and verité footage of the Caribbean to explore the formation of race, class, and gender under colonialism.
Islands is an experimental video that deconstructs a film by John Huston to comment on the Caribbean's relationship to the cinematic image. A story of unrequited love by a shipwrecked American marine (Robert Mitchum) for an Irish nun (Deborah Kerr), Heaven Knows Mr. Allison is set in 1944 in the Pacific, but is shot in 1956 in Tobago using Trinidadian Chinese extras to portray Japanese soldiers. The artist's uncle Clive is one such extra.
Also Directed by Ali Kazimi
Fair Play opens a window to the past and allows viewer to feel as if they are in the presence of materially fathomable, historically accurate, life-sized peoples. With the immediacy and presence that only stereoscopic 3D moving images can evoke, Kazimi asks the viewer to rethink history and immerse themselves into the spaces and lives of the characters.
Spanning over a decade, from 1984 to 1996, Shooting Indians: A Journey with Jeffrey Thomas is an ironic documentary journey full of quiet insights and surprising twists. Starting the film as a foreign student in 1984, Kazimi begins to unravel the hidden history of the land that he has chosen as his home. At one level, Shooting Indians is a portrait of Jeffrey Thomas, an Iroquois photographer. The film explores the influences on his life which led him to his career. It was the work of an American photographer from the turn of the century, Edward Curtis, which forced Thomas to closely examine how Indigenous peoples had been photographed in the past. Thomas views Curtis’ monumental work as a “mountain which must be crossed.” On another level is the irony of an Indian from India making a film on a North American Indian and this is woven throughout the fabric of the film.
“This is the story about a ghost people who live in a ghost territory.” Thus begins this richly documented history of the struggle for recognition of the Sinixt, one of Canada’s indigenous peoples. While other indigenous peoples have legal rights, the Sinixt have none, because they are officially extinct. But the fact is they’re still there.
Silas Fung, a Chinese-American, was a sign designer and painter for Sears in Chicago in the 1930’s. Born into a creative family, he was also an avid painter, musician, church-goer, documentarian and father. After he was married (to Edythe) and had children, he decided to continue his passion for filming by documenting their lives. Over the next two or three decades, he amassed his family’s whole life as they became part of the middle class of America. Meanwhile, in the early 21st century, Ali Kazimi was bidding on an online auction for some 16mm nitrate film cans with Silas’ name on them. After winning them and starting the process of cleaning them up, he was contacted by a lady who was bidding on another lot of Silas’ films and wanted to know who had won the second lot. From there, Kazimi began to interview Silas’ daughter, Irena Lam, and other Chinese-American people who grew up at the same time as Irena as well as experts in Sino-American culture.
Narmada: A Valley Rises is beautifully photographed, inspiring film. It documents a 200 kilometer non-violent Gandhian march involving 6000 participants. The film offers a compelling and intimate portrait of a unique movement while raises critical and universal issues of human-rights, social justice, and development within a democracy.
Continuous Journey is an inquiry into the largely ignored history of Canada's exclusion of the South Asians by a little known immigration policy called the Continuous Journey Regulation of 1908. Unlike the Chinese and the Japanese, people from British India were excluded by a regulation that appeared fair, but in reality, was an effective way of keeping people from India out of Canada until 1948. As a direct result, only a half-mile from Canadian shores, the Komagata Maru was surrounded by immigration boats and the passengers were held incommunicado virtual prisoners on the ship. Thus began a dramatic stand-off which would escalate over the course of two months, becoming one of the most infamous incidents in Canadian history.