Queer Film Classics: Fire & Montreal Main
TINARS presents Queer Film Classics with film clips from Deepa Mehta’s Fire and Frank Vitale’s Montreal Main will be shown and discussed by the celebrated scholar, author and queer rights pioneer, Tom Waugh; the Zakir Hussain Professor of Media at the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, Shohini Ghosh. The interviewer is the film/video artist and activist, John Greyson, whose work includes Fig Trees, Proteus, and Lilies (in which Waugh has a significant “clothing optional” cameo).
Tom Waugh has done major research on documentary cinema, including cinéma direct in Quebec, the documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens, and Indian independent documentary. He has published widely in Canada and the United States on political discourses and sexual representation in film and video, on queer film and video, and on Canadian cinema, and has undertaken inter-disciplinary research and teaching on AIDS and queer studies. Waugh's books are Show Us Life: Towards a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, an anthology (1984), Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from their Beginnings to Stonewall (1996), The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema (2000), Outlines: Underground Gay Graphics From Before Stonewall (2002).
Shohini Ghosh began her documentary film work in the 1990s, co-founding the Mediastorm Collective, an all-women documentary collective which in 1992 received the Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Work among Women Media Professionals. In 1998 she worked with Sabeena Gadihoke on Three Women and a Camera. In 2002 Ghosh produced her first independent documentary, Tales of the Night Fairies, which won a Best Film award at Jeevika 2003 and was shown in 13 countries. She has published a number of academic papers on gender, violence against women, and censorship in India.
John Greyson’s films document the trials and tribulations of Toronto's gay community, while also dealing with such topics as race in A Moffie Called Simon (1986), censorship and copyright in Uncut (1997), police harassment and surveillance in Breathing Through Opposing Nostrils (1982) Urinal (1988), and the AIDS crisis in The AIDS Epidemic (1987) Angry Initiatives, Defiant Strategies (1988) The World Is Sick (Sic) (1989) The Pink Pimpernel (1989) Zero Patience (1993) Lilies (1996) Proteus (2003). His feature film Fig Trees (2009) has been the recipient of a number of awards, including the Teddy for Best Documentary at the Berlinale, the Best Canadian Feature award at the Toronto Inside Out Film Festival, and a Special Award at the Torino GLBT Film Festival.
