John Greyson
In 2021, aspiring chef Phelokazi Ndlwana was stabbed to death because she fought back against her rapist. She was targeted specifically because she was a proud black lesbian, beloved in her home community of Khayelitsha Township, South Africa, and the latest victim in a national epidemic of homophobic violence. Funeka Soldaat and her activist group Free Gender in Khayelitsha took the police to court, alleging incompetence and corruption in Phelokazi's case. Ndodana-Breen and Greyson have crafted an operatic cine-poem inspired by Phelokazi's story, featuring vocals by mezzo-soprano Chantelle Grant.
Outraged by the latest bombing of Gaza, Palestinian queer activists Hamza and Walid recruit queer novelist Jean Genet to help them sabotage the Eurovision song contest in Jericho. Their method? Secure the collaboration of Buddy and Pedro, Toronto's famous gay penguins... The emergence of queer BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) as a dynamic Palestinian-led global movement is brought to vivid life through interviews and actions, opera and agitprop, protests and pranks. Recounting fifteen years of passionate activism in Toronto and worldwide, Photo Booth juxtaposes a surreal operatic narrative with documentary scenes that explore pride and pink-washing, gay soldiers and homo-nationalism, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, and the accelerating weaponization of anti-Semitism.
The colour pink has been ascribed many meanings, from a reflection of the feminine to a symbol of reclaimed humanity by LGBTQ2S communities. In his latest work, avant-garde filmmaker John Greyson explores the colonial implications of the colour pink, from its association with activist movements to its colouring of the water in Grassy Narrows due to mercury poisoning. Pink this.
Gazonto, the fun new online video game -- bringing the Gaza war home to Hogtown! You can recreate the 2014 Israeli assault, bomb by bomb -- but hey, it's been remapped onto Toronto neighbourhoods! Blow up Kensington Market, Shaw-Givens School, Scarborough General Rehab Centre... and 5000 other T-dot targets.
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.
In June 2011, John Greyson joined a freedom flotilla trying to sail to Gaza to break Israel's blockade. Green Laser weaves together interviews and documentary footage with Hornet lore, Riverdance moves and rewritten clips from Exodus (featuring a shirtless Paul Newman) to explore questions of solidarity, civil disobedience, queer activism and the growing boycott movement.
Two gay penguins receive an all-expenses paid, same-sex wedding in Toronto. There's a catch, however - the couple must serve as spokesmodels for a new series of gay literary classics. Even penguin love has a price tag.
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.
FIG TREES is a documentary opera about AIDS activists Tim McCaskell of Toronto and Zackie Achmat of Capetown as they fight for access to treatment drugs. Documentary interviews, speeches, press conferences and demonstrations are sampled, taken apart, and set to music, replayed this time as operatic scenes. A surreal fictional narrative is intercut with the stories of their struggles against government and the pharmaceutical industry. In this fictional world, Gertrude Stein decides to write a tragic opera about Tim and Zackie and their saint-like heroism. She kidnaps them, transports them to Niagara Falls, and forces them to sing a series of complicated avant-garde vocal compositions. However, when Zackie ends his treatment strike and starts taking his pills, Gertrude realizes that there will be no more tragedy, and thus, no more opera.
"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."
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.
When the Iraq Film Archives were destroyed by US bombs during the 2003 war, a journalist rescued eight scraps of celluloid from the wreckage, totalling 14.3 seconds. In 2004, ICARP (the Iraq Coalition Archives Restoration Project) announced that it intended to use these scraps to painstakingly reconstruct what was once considered the greatest collection of Arab Cinema in the world. Here are the first six restorations, including Al Mas' Ala Al-Kubra (Mohamed Shukri Jameel, 1983, an epic about the 1920’s uprising against British colonial rule, starring Yousef al-Any and Oliver Reed) and Al Ayyam Al-Tawila (Tewfik Saleh, 1980, based on an autobiographical novel by Saddam Hussein).
An analog animation using the same set of drawings to tell four different versions of the same story. The emotional fallout of two witnesses to a police shooting, a musical about groovy gay boys making the scene, a cop show about the chase and arrest of a suspect, and a news report about soldiers on leave in Iraq.
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.
An alphabet of 26 queer avant-garde composers woo Zackie Ackmet, the South African AIDS treatment activist, each arguing that he is the best choice for writing an opera about Zackie's
Story of the same couple, first in their teenage years and then in their twilight years, paradoxically set in the same time during the backdrop of the Gulf War in the Middle East.
Dimitrije in Belgrade sends daily emails to Jack, describing life in the shadow of the NATO bombing campaign. At night in Toronto, Jack dreams that he's a CIA operative, assigned to assassinate antiwar theorist Noam Bombski.
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).
Expose into how the news story of a kiddie porn bust was fabricated / sensationalized / distorted by police officials, journalists and social workers to create the specter of a "province-wide child pornography ring"
1952: Bishop Bilodeau visits a québécois prison to hear the confession of a boyhood friend jailed for murder 40 years ago. The inmates force the prelate to watch a play depicting what really happened in 1912. We meet him as a young man, strait-laced, intent on convincing Simon (now the convict) to join the seminary with him.
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".
Experimental musical based on a factual incident, the beating to death of a homosexual man in Toronto, 1985, by five teenagers.
This documentary portrait of environmental activist Lou Figurelli was produced by a workshop group at Staten Island Community TV, with John Greyson facillitating. Figurelli recounts his twenty-year fight to clean up the Island's waterways and reduce the size of the landfill dump, the largest in the world. In particular, he speaks about how his struggles with chronic spina bifida helped him discover his passion for clean water, since he gained mobility and independence as a teenager by exercising in water. His stories of environmental activism, battling city government to enforce existing clean water laws, are illustrated with humorous computer graphics created with Amiga software by the workshop participants. His charismatic humor and blunt speaking make him an engaging and eloquent champion of environmental issues.
An intertextual essay retelling the reactionary French Revolution thriller The Scarlet Pimpernel and featuring Percy as an apolitical dandy and his estranged boyfriend Justin, an AIDS activist fighting for the release of treatment drugs. Juxtaposed with interviews with AIDS Action Now members who describe their battle against homophobic governents and profit-hungry pharmaceuticals.
An experimental documentary on the activist interventions at the Fifth International Conference on AIDS in Montreal, in June 1989. While making fun of television news conventions, the tape prioritizes the voices of grassroots AIDS educators and People with AIDS activists from Trinidad, Thailand, South Africa, Australia, the United States, and Canada. Demonstrations and interventions by AIDS activists from Montreal, Toronto, and the United States take centre stage, literally.
AIDS activists discuss the merits and harms of AZT, one of the first drugs approved to treat HIV.
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.
A short remake of Luchino Visconti's "Death in Paris," where instead of a cholera epidemic it's the "Acquired Dread of Sex" (ADS) epidemic.
The two central characters are breaking up. Moira flees to Paris; Stan goes up north with gay writer friend, Timothy. Moira returns and joins Stan and Timothy up north to sort things out. Roberta, Stan's old friend also arrives. The next 24 hours reveal the assortment of tensions, expectations, humour and discontents of four people experiencing the difficult transition to middle age. The four characters return to Toronto to resume their separate lives.
Documentary about the ten days the director spent in Moscow, during the 1986 Moscow Youth Festival, as kind of a gay delegate.
A collage of found footage from different media presenting the case of Simon Nkodi, a black gay activist and student leader in South Africa, who had been in jail for two years when the film was produced. Exploring the connections between anti-apartheid struggles and gay liberation, A Moffie Called Simon is based on letters from Nkodi to his lover, Ray, a Canadian gay journalist.
No Voice Over is a story of communication and affection, focusing on the close ties between three women artists as they correspond via audio and video tape as they travel to Italy, Brazil, and Texas. All three have an off screen working relationship with a producer called Dix-Ten. The tape details a series of visions or second-sight experiences that one woman has about the other. These events are disturbing and seem to contain some ominous portent, which remains unclear until the end of the tape, when it is revealed that the visions are in fact premonitions of one of the woman's death.
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.
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.
Michel Focault and Tennessee Williams meet the police in Orillia, Ontario, in this mixed media performance film about the 1983 Canadian washroom arrests.
The relationship between gay people and mainstream values in society. During a production of a music video, actor and director are disturbed by cultural values and their own relationship.
A 60 minute tape that tells in flash-form the story of a European art critic and her relationship to three people; her lesbian lover who died of cancer, a Canadian actor/ director in theatre, and a young performance artist who adopts her persona in a performance. The issue deals with sexual roles, love relationships and women's views of themselves in social/sexual relationships with women and men.
Two main characters, a young gay man, and his female (heterosexual) boss exchange stories about their personal problems, (his difficulties about being gay, and his fears about losing his job because of it). She talks of her neglectful husband whom she suspects is having an affair with another woman.
Canada resurrects the compulsory draft, but refuses to allow gays to enlist. Taking the form of a fictional community-access documentary, The First Draft purports to present struggles of a Paris, Ontario-based gay anti-war group opposing both the homophobic exclusion and the draft itself. Complete with tacky graphics and ribald war-songs, the tape looks at the limitations of constructing alternative media within a dominant culture.
Birds from six continents on a zoom call gossip about the deaths of Egyptian filmmaker Shady Habash and Egyptian queer activist Sarah Hegazi.
