QPIRG Concordia’s Keeping it Reel Subversive Cinema Series, in collaboration with Q-Team, the Prisoner Correspondence Project, Queer Concordia, Queer McGill, the 2110 Centre for Gender Advocacy, and the Union for Gender Empowerment present:
Criminal Queers: A Montreal Film Premiere and Directors’ Talk
When: Friday, November 13 at 7:30 p.m.
Where: Room H-110, Hall Building, 1450 De Maisonneuve Blvd., West.
Criminal Queers visualizes a radical trans/queer struggle against the prison industrial complex and toward a world without walls.
Remembering that prison breaks are both a theoretical and material practice of freedom, this film imagines what spaces might be opened up if crowbars, wigs, and metal files become tools for transformation.
Follow Yoshi, Joy, Susan and Lucy as they fiercely read everything from the Human Rights Campaign and hate crimes legislation to the non-profitization of social movements. Criminal Queers grows our collective liberation by working to abolish the multiple ways our hearts, genders, and desires are confined.
The film brings together powerful abolitionist voices like Angela Y. Davis (who plays herself in the film), with a fictional, campy world of queer insurrection. Reworking what a queer history might mean for the possibility of surviving the present, the program centers the devastating effects the prison industrial complex (PIC) has had on transgender/ gender non-conforming and queer communities.
The program will include a lecture by the California filmmakers Chris Vargas and Eric Stanley, giving historical and contemporary analysis and examples of the ways in which queer communities are impacted by forms of state violence; two shorts called The Digital Storytelling Project made by transgender ex-prisoners, which help show the chain links between homophobia, racism, normative gender systems and incarceration; the feature film, Criminal Queers; and a question and answer period with the artists.
For more information, visit the QPIRG Concordia website, or the film’s website.
Posted on November 4, 2009
