Past EventSymposium

Keynote: Queer Wonderlands: Yolanda Bonnell and Lior Shamriz

Sunday, April 23, 2023
6:00–8:00pm EST
In Person
Tranzac Club
Online
TQFF.ca
Available Now
120 min.

The work of storyteller Yolanda Bonnell (she/they) aims to provide Indigi-Queer representation on and off the stage as well as disrupting the colonial structures of theatre. Bonnell believes in creating opportunities to have stories with Queer characters just existing as themselves. She has said that “representation is harm reduction,” particularly when it comes to Indigenous youth. For her keynote talk, Bonnell will be discussing her career as an actor, writer, director and especially how her work and the work of manidoons collective centers the stories, methodologies, and experiences of Indigenous 2SLGBTQ+ people.

With witty irony and superfluous melodrama, Lior Shamriz treats cinema not merely as the documentation of a dramatic performance but as a trace of the interaction between actors, crew, memory, and place, using the screen to project and examine topics like immigration, post-colonialism and orientalism, othering and belonging. “A separation of reality from mimesis is a dualist illusion,” Shamriz says. “A film is often not a record of an interaction, but rather, it is the interaction with the spaces we visit and the people we encounter”. For their keynote talk, Shamriz will discuss their work in research-based essay videos, poetry videos, performance, and independent cinema, and will turn to Keguro Macharia’s concept of Frottage to consider cinema as a medium of gathering traces of interactions that activate our engagement with the world.

This event is an online webinar. To attend, please log into your TQFF account and return to this page when the event is live. No other registration is required.

Our Partners:

Presenter
Yolanda Bonnell

(She/They) is a Bi/Queer 2 Spirit Anishinaabe-Ojibwe, South Asian mixed storyteller from Fort William First Nation, ON. Her play bug was nominated for four Dora awards, while the published version was shortlisted for a Governor General Literary Award. Yolanda was the first Indigenous artist recipient of the Jayu Arts for Human Rights Award for her work and won the PGC Tom Hendry Drama Award for My Sister’s Rage. Yolanda has taught/facilitated at schools like York University and Sheridan College and proudly bases her practice in land-based creation, drawing on energy and inspiration from the earth and her ancestors.

Presenter
Lior Shamriz’s

essayistic narrations utilize cinema as performance and cinematic languages as a process of reflexive documentation. Their oeuvre includes feature-length independent films, many short experimental films, poetry videos, and performances. It was shown at festivals and venues such as Berlinale (2010,13,15), Locarno, MoMA’s ND/NF, Frameline, MixNYC, Nouveau Cinema, and Tokyo IAFT (2018,20). They’re the winner of multiple awards at Oberhausen (2013-14-15), were nominated for the Max Ophüls Prize, shortlisted for the German National Gallery Prize for Young Art Film, and received retrospectives at Steak Cinema Seoul, Ars independent Katowice, and the Thessaloniki International Film Festival.

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