Viral interventions

Monday, January 1, 2022 | 12am EST
Canada

The screening will be available on this page at 7:10 p.m. EST and a panel discussion will be followed by it on Zoom (Registration required). For the screening, please ensure you have bought a ticket / availed a free ticket from www.tqff.ca/tickets

If you miss this screening and panel discussion, fear not, this will be archived and available on our website post the event.

In 1991, local artists and grassroots activists collaborated on an innovative public access cable series entitled Toronto Living with AIDS (and were eventually shut down because of “too much thigh stroking”). These half-hour, no-budget tapes were some of the first in Canada to give voice to people living with HIV: fighting the government, fighting big pharma, fighting for our lives.

Thirty years later, in the grip of our new pandemic, Viral Interventions continues this work for a new generation. Viral Interventions is a three-year residency, with cohorts of artists and activists coming together every month to workshop stories, trade ideas and create new urgent videos about living with HIV today. Intimate, passionate, irreverent, angry, unabashedly beautiful, inventively radical, brimming with loss and joy — these new works by Longboy, Chan, Mikiki, Lopez/Hui, Zealley, and Mondesir plunge us inside six extraordinary stories, exploring HIV realities – in our worlds and in our bodies.

FILMMAKERS AND FILMS

Samuel López and Christian Hui, Walking in These Shoes
Zachery C Longboy, Guardian of Sleep
Andrew Zealley, Becoming Mighty Real
Lesley Chan, Unfinished
Mikiki, smokescreengrab

Partners

Moderator
Darien Taylor

has been living with HIV for over 30 years and has been continuously engaged in the community-based response to HIV during that time. She has worked and volunteered in many local AIDS service organizations. Darien played a significant ongoing role in the Toronto treatment activist organization AIDS ACTION NOW! and founded Voices of Positive Women, a provincial organization run by and for women living with HIV, which existed until 2010. She co-edited the international anthology Positive Women: Voices of Women Living with HIV, which features works by women living with HIV. As the current co-chair of the Toronto to Zero initiative she is fighting to end the HIV epidemic in this city. She is a mentor to the Viral Interventions video project.

min Canada

2022