Re: Orientations  

Written & Directed by Richard Fung, 68 minutes (2016)

Screening & Panel Discussion
Filmmaker In Attendance

Tuesday, January 17, 2017

5:30 pm     Reception with refreshments & cash bar
6-8 pm       Film screening, followed by a panel discussion and Q&A with Richard Fung

Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre
Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
SFU Woodward's, 149 West Hastings Street

Free and open to the public. The film will be screened with open captioning and ASL interpretation will be provided for the panel discussion.

Trailer

Description

A fascinating look into the lives and thoughts of seven queer pan-Asian Canadians as they look back on a 1984 documentary in which they featured. How have they changed? And how has the world around them evolved and changed?

In 1984, Richard Fung released his seminal first documentary Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Asians. Featuring 14 women and men in Toronto of South, East and Southeast Asian backgrounds, Orientations was the first documentary to explore the experiences and perspectives of queer Asians in North America. Capturing pivotal moments in Toronto’s history, it presents an intimate portrait of the texture of gay live and politics at that time. Re:Orientations revisits seven of the original participants as they see anew the footage of their younger selves, and reflect on their lives and all that has changed over the intervening three decades. Their interviews are deepened and contextualized by conversations with six younger queer and trans activists, scholars and artists.

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Publication From The Panel Discussion:

Richard Fung’s Re:Orientations in Vancouver

Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas
by Phanuel Antwi, Richard Fung, Christine Kim, and Helen Hok-Sze Leung

 

About the filmmaker:

Richard Fung is an artist and writer born in Trinidad and based in Toronto. He holds a diploma from the Ontario College of Art, a degree in cinema studies and an MEd in sociology and cultural studies, both from the University of Toronto. He is Professor in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University, teaching courses in Integrated Media and Art and Social Change. 

His work comprises challenging videos on subjects ranging from the role of the Asian male in gay pornography to colonialism, immigration, racism, homophobia, AIDS, justice in Israel/Palestine, and his own family history. His single-channel and installation works, which include My Mother’s Place(1990), Sea in the Blood (2000), Jehad in Motion (2007), Dal Puri Diaspora (2012) and Re:Orientations (2016), have been widely screened and collected internationally, and have been broadcast in Canada, the United States and Trinidad and Tobago. 

Richard’s essays have been published in many journals and anthologies, and he is the co-author with Monika Kin Gagnon of 13: Conversations on Art and Cultural Race Politics (2002), later updated and translated into French. He was a Rockefeller Fellow at New York University and has received the Bell Canada Award for Outstanding Achievement in Video Art and the Toronto Arts Award for Media Art. In 2015, he received the Kessler Award from CLAGS: Center for LGBTQ Studies at the City University of New York for “a substantive body of work that has had a significant influence on the field of LGBTQ Studies.

About the panelists:

Phanuel Antwi is assistant professor of English at University of British Columbia. He writes, researches, and teaches critical black studies; settler colonial studies; black Atlantic and diaspora studies; Canadian literature and culture since 1830; critical race, gender, and sexuality studies; and material cultures. He has published articles in Interventions, Affinities, and Studies in Canadian Literature, and he is completing a book-length project titled “Currencies of Blackness: Faithfulness, Cheerfulness and Politeness in Settler Writing.”

Cynthia Low is currently the Executive Director of Britannia Community Services Centre. She has worked as an administrator for the Downtown East Side Women's Centre, the UBC Learning Exchange, and the Asian Society for the Intervention of AIDS. She was also the director of Lotus Roots: Queer Asian Festival in 2002.

Helen Hok-Sze Leung is an Associate Professor in the Department of of Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong (UBC Press, 2008) and Farewell My Concubine: A Queer Film Classic (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010). She co-edits the Queer Asia book series (Hong Kong UP) and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Chinese Cinemas (Routledge), Transgender Studies Quarterly (Duke UP), and Asian Visual Cultures (Amsterdam UP).

Jen Sungshine speaks for a living, but lives for breathing life into unspoken situations in unusual places. As a queer, Taiwanese artist-activist based on the traditional homelands of the Coast Salish nations, she facilitates with creativity and social justice media through her work at: Love IntersectionsOur City of ColoursOut in Schools and The Social Justice Institute at UBC. Jen’s artistic practice involves learning through unlearning; and instead of calling you out, she wants to call you in, to make artful social change with her. In the audience, she looks for art in your interruption.