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Vital Transgressions Screening + Talk
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Vital Trangressions is a 4-year research-creation laboratory that tests the dynamic and troubled relationship between queer transgression and queer activism on screen.
When Foucault was invoking transgression and the spiral to approach Bataille, he was working within a disciplinary paradigm where queer/Trans bodies and subjects remained largely outlawed and shunned by our states, churches, and societies. This was the era of The Body Politic, Toronto’s gay liberation magazine, where transgression and activism famously co-existed in a tense and productive duet.
Half a century later, we find our LGBTQ+ selves at the centre of a homo-nationalized mainstream, embraced by banks and vodka brands, ‘proud’ citizens possessing pink rights and rainbow mortgages. Neo-liberalism has sought to domesticate and monetize our communities. Yet in the face of such domestication, questions of on-screen transgression and activism remain even more urgent for a new generation. At their core is an aching dilemma: if transgression’s signature move is productive outrage, and activism’s raison d’etre is tactical efficacy, are the two doomed to stick to their respective lanes — or can they jump the tracks (and meet in the gutter)?
VT invites a community of thinkers and makers to explore this key question: in our post-queer moment, can activism and transgression meaningfully collaborate, reigniting the promise of new queer/trans cinemas today?
Each film/filmmaker/s will have 15 minutes to present their films. Following the 6 presentations, we’ll have 20 min of dialogue with a moderator between the 6 projects, and then open it up for questions.
Films
Friends and collaborators Amina Cruz and Jamie Ross stage a response to one of the earliest pornographic films surviving in its entirety, El Satario (1907), a rare print of which is held in the University of Toronto’s Sexual Representation Collection. The tale of outdoor sex is adapted by erotic performers from the contemporary DIY porn and postporn milieux of the US and Mexico, more than a century later.
What is, or might have been, a queer Arab girlhood seen through the lens of many decades, diasporic displacements, civil war, transition, and transformed yet enduring geographies, desires, politics and languages? In this poetic video short, two women dream towards the past, and open themselves to how the past persists and fashions this present, in ways that are intimate, violent, and unknowable. Shot between Lebanon and Nova Scotia, and employing some archival footage, it offers traces of lives lived and imagined.
Pornography is watched privately at home for our own pleasure, but just outside, the Hungry Ghost Festival burns all around in honour of our ancestors trapped in another realm. As hungry ghosts make their annual sojourn into the human realm and enjoy the offerings of food and song, what if all they desired was just to be touched?
Toss & Turn explores intimate histories embedded within discarded mattresses found in Montreal’s streets. Often overlooked or considered waste, these mattresses become sacred sites for memories of rest, desire, displacement, and survival. They serve as both sculptural screens and symbolic anchors onto which carefully shot images of queer bodies are projected. These projections are then refilmed during street interventions, creating layered documentation that becomes the primary content for the final film.
A hybrid short film combining documentary, science fiction, film-poem, and essay, Scarsedge traces t4t intimacy, viral contagion, and hormonal transformation across bodies and landscapes. Set after the world has already ended, following an act of trans bioterrorism and the convulsions of empires, there emerges an undergrowth of touch, light, skin, and scars.
“I discovered who I was at Dylan’s Sleepover and all I got was this lousy short.”