Friday June 16, 9pm PWYC
@ Steelworkers Hall, 25 Cecil Street
Co-presentation with Toronto Queer Film Festival (June 14 — 17)
Part of Summer 2017
Join Pleasure Dome and TQFF for a program of experimental and artist’s moving image at the 2nd Toronto Queer Film Festival, a festival showcasing contemporary, innovative, queer and trans film and video art!
Queer Geographies maps the layered and resistant histories of liminal queer spaces: psychic spaces, ancient ruins, traveled cityscapes and highways. These films intimately trace what it means for queer bodies to navigate inherently hetero spaces – the architecture and cultural structures. Through personal essay-style address, they traverse space and time -beyond points on a map – in their resistant retelling of personal and family histories that layer and push up against other ghosts.
TQFF is especially interested in supporting formally experimental films and/or social justice themed projects that center the experiences of Indigenous people, people of color, people with disabilities, transgender people, sex workers, porn makers, and other communities often marginalized in contemporary LGBT cultural programming and spaces.
PROGRAM
Reluctantly Queer
Akosua Adoma Owusu | 2016 | 8:24 | United States
This epistolary short film invites us into the unsettling life of a young Ghanaian man struggling to reconcile his love for his mother with his love for same-sex desire amid the increased tensions incited by same-sex politics in Ghana. Focused on a letter that is ultimately filled with hesitation and uncertainty, Reluctantly Queer both disrobes and questions what it means to be queer for this man in this time and space.
Bateria
Damian Sainz | 2016 | 15:00 | Cuba
The ruins of an ancient military fortress outside Havana have become a clandestine gay cruising spot. Cuban male homosexuals come here not only looking for sex, but also for a refuge behind the old walls and the rubble.
À Vancouver
Vincent Chevalier | 2016 | 34:50 | Canada
À Vancouver is an experimental video essay staged within the genre of a father-son road trip movie. Blending documentary and fiction and switching between English and French subtitles, the video examines and expands upon parallel events in their lives, wherein each traveled across Canada to Vancouver and had formative (homo)sexual experiences at separate moments in time: the father as an 18-year-old traveling in the mid-60s and the son (filmmaker, Vincent Chevalier) as a young teen and then adult in the mid-90s and 2000s. Ultimately, À Vancouver explores individual and cultural histories as a story of what will have been.
Total Running Time: 1hr
For full program details see: www.torontoqueerfilmfest.com.
