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Anoushka Ratnarajah, artistic director of the 33rd Annual Vancouver Queer Film Festival, indicates that this year’s event can be a special place for learning and growth through experiencing art. She argues that because stories create profound opportunities for connection, it becomes important to have spaces for queer folks to experience that bond, to understand their…
The pandemic offers people the opportunity to heal the inner landscape of the human soul, says Anosh Irani, a Vancouver-based author. Irani addresses the human subterranean in an online hybrid between a play and a film, creating a space for conversation with the audience at the 2021 Indian Summer Festival (July 15–17). “I always write…
“I was about ten years old, and I looked at myself in the mirror in my parent’s bedroom, questioning: Why was I born Chinese? I remember feeling alone and ugly because of my race.” “People should not live in fear of not being accepted. I was born and raised in Canada; therefore, I should not…
Queer Filipino photographer Rydel Cerezo invites audiences to fail. He sees failure as a means to open new possibilities for queer and marginalized bodies to thrive. His exhibition at the Burrard Arts Foundation Gallery (BAF), entitled New Ending, investigates the space between sexuality, religion, and race, and how these disparate themes coalesce metaphorically and visually. As…
“Art and love are powerful mechanisms that impact change,’’ says Jen Sungshine, co-creative director and founder of Love Intersections. Sungshine, a queer Taiwanese interdisciplinary artist and activist, says Vancouver’s Love Intersections is a media arts collective dedicated to collaborative filmmaking and relational storytelling. “We are not single-issue people who lead single-issue lives,” says Sunghine. “As…
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…
the doctor says, brain tumor and my mother does not answer I watch my ghost leave her body from where I am eye-to-eye, confined to sterile bed & papery sheets aging is tenuous in my small body a carriage of all her favourite memories Excerpt from “age nine” (Nisha Patel in Coconut, Newest Press) “Some…
“We are setting the stage for something that transcends us. A new form of life is emerging. Artificial Intelligence is rapidly reshaping the world. It’s going to be everywhere all the time. It’s going to hear everything. It’s going to be connected to every single camera on the planet. AI will ultimately be the best…
“The pandemic has rendered useless many of the urban resilience plans that have been made over the past decade,” says Simon Fraser University (SFU) professor Meg Holden (PhD), director of the Urban Studies Program. “It presented us with the kind of emergency that our cities were unprepared for,” she adds. She will be co-panelist on…
Cofounder of the MIX New York LGBT Experimental Film and Video Festival, and co-director of the groundbreaking ACT UP Oral History Project, Sarah Schulman argues that when people are raised or otherwise made to feel superior, being asked to be self-critical causes them discomfort, and to see the challenge to this internalized sense of dominance…
The Polygon Gallery opens a new exhibition by artists Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes and Maya Beaudry, where photography is used to discuss the present era of visual information overload. In the exhibition Everything Leaks the artists take familiar, everyday images and render them mysteriously. The mixed media exhibition uses stickers, watercolor and mixed media to discuss the present…
Alissa Antle, PhD, explains that a collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Curatio, a digital health company that develops peer-to-peer private online support communities, is creating a digital application that will help children overcome social-emotional and mental health challenges related to the impact of COVID-19. “Are children in danger when they go outdoors?” asks…
On Nov. 19, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) will celebrate World Philosophy Day by inviting communities to unmask social dogmas and prejudices, and discover the universality of the human condition. An invitation to read and know philosophy can be the first step in understanding how political and social structures can help…
