>> Montreal Premiere of CRIMINAL QUEERS - Friday November 13th @ 7:30pm
Saturday, October 31, 2009 - 04:37 AM
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
Friday, November 13th @ 7:30pm
Concordia University, Hall Building - 1455 de Maisonneuve Ouest, Room H-110
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.
Criminal Queers 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.
This event was also made possible, in part, by the generous support of the Arts and Science Federation of Associations at Concordia and T. Waugh, Concordia Research Chair in Sexual Representation.
The cinema is wheelchair accessible. Please get in touch 48 hours in advance if you need childcare or have other accessibility needs (info@qpirgconcordia.org)
also check out:
www.criminalqueersfilm.net
www.prisonercorrespondenceproject.com
