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“Being able to give kids positive queer role models at the same age is important,” says director Kenneth Elvebakk about Hello World. “When I was young, not even Elton John was openly gay. Today there are many gay celebrities in the media. So why are kids and young gay teenagers still afraid of telling others who…
For three days, the Skoden Indigenous Film Festival (SIFF) will be celebrating Indigenous filmmakers across Canada while also promoting SFU’s interests in diversity and reconciliation. It will also feature Indigenous cultural traditions including a welcome ceremony and witness. Skoden is a slang term which means “let’s go then!” The film festival was founded in 2019…
Last December, Lindsay McIntyre, a filmmaker of Inuk and Scottish descent won the Women In the Director’s Chair’s (WIDC) Feature Film Award. Estimated at $250,000 in services and rentals, the prize will support the making of her first feature film The Words We Can’t Speak, expected for 2024. “It’s a story about identity and belonging,…
Director Tunç Şahin wants the hunted to become the hunter in his film Two Types of People. The movie, presented by the Vancouver Turkish Film Festival (VTFF) on Dec. 8. follows three characters and their will to survive a system that puts them into heavy debt. Şahin and producer Ersan Çongar reveal that their film reflects…
Portraits from a Fire is a film focused on a young boy, Tyler, who uses the power of cinema to unravel the secrets of his reserve. Through this journey, one sees the loneliness that Tyler faces due to having an unstable household as his father is distant and his mother is deceased. This loneliness fuels Tyler…
The economic mammoth that is the global gig economy is the subject of director and UBC film professor Shannon Walsh’s film The Gig is Up. From the experiences of Parisian drivers sustaining the most popular delivery and taxiing apps, to the trials of Nigerian “crowd workers” who make a living sorting algorithms and search engine…
Drake, a 22-year-old gay man from Uganda, leaves his country behind. In Canada, he is welcomed by a group of strangers from Vancouver’s queer community united under the banner of Rainbow Refugee, a non-profit that connects LGBTQ+ asylum claimants with sponsors. Someone Like Me, a documentary released in 2021 by the directing duo Sean Horlor…
As an inside voice of the queer Muslim community, Vancouver Queer Film Festival (VQFF)’s Closing Gala Film delivers an intelligent rom-com that is also a celebration on intersectional identities. “I have created the gay, Muslim version of Julia Roberts,” humorously says director Mike Mosallam about his acclaimed film Breaking Fast. Building complex and realistic queer characters,…
In our lives, we do some activities so automatically that we do not realize how art, or even existential questions might be present in them. Grocery shopping is one example. As customers, we tend to do it quickly, and not think about the relationships between the supermarket workers, and the richness of the universe. That…
The precise number of languages spoken on this planet is not really known. For a variety of reasons, some may become endangered, and finally lost. Some examples of lost languages are Latin, Sanskrit, Coptic (the language of the Egyptians) and Sumerian. The main reasons they are no longer spoken is that their native speakers are…
Edward Madojemu, a 19-year-old Emily Carr University student who arrived in Vancouver just two years ago from Nigeria, has not only built a new life for himself in a new country, but also managed to construct new worlds in virtual reality (VR) based on his personal experience of moving. Madojemu’s first VR graphic novel, Dami and Falian,…
The Pooni sisters are after justice. Because We Are Girls is an upcoming documentary about the journey of Jeeti, Salakshana, and Kira Pooni as they try to bring a sexual predator from their childhood to justice. The documentary received official selection at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto. Due to popular demand the documentary…
Marking the eighth anniversary of the March 11th Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, UBC hosts (March 17) documentarian Hitomi Kamanaka and her newest film Little Voices from Fukushima, a film focusing on mothers and their children displaced by the disaster and subsequent clean-up efforts. M.V. Ramana, Ph.D − Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Affairs, professor Faculty…
