PROCESSION: New Queer/Trans Global Cinemas

PROCESSION is a film screening and panel featuring new works by BIPOC alumni from York University’s Queer Summer Institute and Cinema & Media Arts. 

In this moment of accelerating visibility and violence, how do queer/trans artists put our worlds on screen? For some, the act of the procession — to celebrate, to mourn, gestural and flamboyant, performative and private, both in the street and at home — can also be a politics of resistance, a poetics of agency. This panel/screening will feature new queer/Trans hybrid films that navigate issues of the procession, testing tactics of performance, hybridity, transgression, and the translocal. Following the screening, the artists will talk about their ‘processions’ with moderator [tbd]. 

Co-presented by Viral Interventions, York’s Queer Summer Institute, Cinema & Media Arts, Sensorium, Archive/Counter Archive, Hemispheric Encounters and Sexuality Studies. Curated by Mary Bunch & John Greyson, and presented at Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences Congress 2023. 

PROGRAM

UNTITLED, Ostoro Petahtegoose (2022, 3 min). Digital performance confronting discourses about TransIndigenous sex work. 

KAILI, Leena Manimekalai (2022, 10 min). On the eve of Pride, the goddess explores downtown Toronto (Kaili has been the target of a global Hindu funadmentalist censorship campaign, accusing Manimekalai of blasphemy) 

BUTCH, Lokchi Lam (2022, 6 min). A talking boob struggles with desire, identity and gender in the boxing ring, 

SWORDS & TRANSVESTIS, Ribamar Oliveros (2022, 5 min). Trans brincante performer Pinto at the centre of her local Reisado festival in north-eastern Brazil. 

I AM YOUR GHOST, lee williams boudakian (2021, 10 min). Three generations Armenian immigrants navigate rituals of grief and gender. 

OF WHAT DEATH WE DIE, Esery Mondesir (2022, 8 min.) Mondesir searches for memories of his dad, who died of AIDS in 1980 in Port-au-Prince. 

CALL ME UNCLE, Amil Shivji (2022, 8 min.) Tanzanian queer singer Tofa Jaxx writes a song about life of HIV/Trans activist Aunty Ali. 

MELA JALOOS, Abdullah Quereshi (2022, 12 min). Queer/trans futures collide at the Madho Lal Hussain shrine in Lahore