The Making of Monsters

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.

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.

An intertextual essay clashing gay porn, Mexican pop songs; imperialist fiction (Zoltan Korda’s 1942 Technicolor epic The Jungle Book), and Toronto landscapes. While a TV journalist examines the contradictory homoeroticism and imperialism of a Rudyard Kipling film adaptation, her husband undergoes his own coming-out narrative and confronts the politics and fantasy of washroom sex.