The Trans Film Screening is an important fixture in our Linked Oppressions event series that we're excited to help host again this year in collaboration with the Sexual & Gender Diversity Office and the librarians at Robarts Media Commons.
Linked Oppressions was born out of the realization that our individual lives and identities continue to be shaped by the intersectionality of multiple types of discrimination. The ways in which we are racialized and marked by gender, sexuality and dis/ability impact how we occupy certain spaces, negotiate personal relationships and encounter everyday realities.
An annual tradition of the Equity Studies Student Union, Linked Oppressions is a month-long event series that examines how various forms of marginalization, (with an emphasis on racism, homophobia and transphobia), are articulated, experienced and resisted.
Our Trans Film Screening night will feature an emphasis on the experiences of Queer communities in Latin America and the Caribbean, with opening remarks by Nikoli Adrian Attai, followed by a screening of short film Antiman (2014) and ethnofiction Transfiction (2012).
Nikoli Adrian Attai is an international PhD student in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. A national of Trinidad and Tobago, he read for a Master of Philosophy in Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies (UWI), St. Augustine campus, and completed a research project that investigated the ways that local transgender persons established a sense of community within their circles. Currently, Nikoli is pursuing a PhD dissertation with a similar aim of interrogating the formation of transgender identity and community in Trinidad and Tobago, with an emphasis on how transgender bodies and communities transgress normative constructions of gender and sexuality, while positing new ways of being and existing in the present and future.
Antiman (2014) | Directed by Gavin Ramoutar | Runtime: 20 minutes
Set in Guyana, South America, Antiman is a film about self-discovery and masculinity in the Caribbean. Anil, an introverted young boy, is pressured by his abusive father, Max, to become a skillful cricket player the way he himself was years before. Although skilled in the game, Anil refuses to play and takes refuge in his love for Dano, an older boy in the village. In order to attend the local masquerade and see the boy he pines for, Anil must win the cricket tournament.
Transfiction (2012) | Directed by Johannes Sjöberg | Runtime: 56 minutes
Transfiction explores 'ethnofiction' - an experimental ethnographic documentary film style in which the participants collaborate with the filmmaker to act out their own and others' life experiences in improvisations. The film focuses on identity and discrimination in the daily lives of transgendered Brazilians living in São Paulo. Fabia Mirassos projects her life through the role of Meg, a transsexual hairdresser confronting intolerance and re-living memories of abuse. Savana 'Bibi' Meirelles plays Zilda who makes her living as one of the many transgendered sex workers in São Paulo, as she struggles to find her way out of prostitution.
doors open at 6:00PM | event will begin promptly at 6:30PM
this is an accessible space | refreshments will be served | gender-neutral washrooms available | all bodies welcome
** Please contact us with any accessibility concerns and/or dietary restrictions before Thursday, November 20. **