QUEER CINEMA CLUB
Animation by Paul Twa
Queer Cinema Club is more than a film series: it’s a mission to bring Toronto’s LGBTQ folks together in celebration of some of the best queer cinema ever made.
Every month at the Paradise Theatre, curator and host Peter Knegt will be offering queers (and anyone who loves them) a classic queer film, special guests and performers, and some good old fashioned drinks and conversation in the Paradise’s lobby bar. Each film is paired with a different local queer artist, who designs an original poster for the screening (which will be available for purchase the night of the event).
Up next…
30 years ago, the great Deepa Mehta gnited the hearts of so many when she gave us Fire, the first film in what would become her iconic “elements trilogy.”
Loosely based on Ismat Chughtai’s 1942 story “Lihaaf” (The Quilt), the film marked a groundbreaking portrait of two Indian women (Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das) who fall fiercely in love with each other. Its release in India was met with extreme controversy, with right wing politicians calling it “immoral and pornographic” and even smashing glass planes and burning posters at screenings.
Fire would set off a flurry of public dialogue around both gay rights and freedom of speech, and ultimately led to lesbian and gay rights activists in India to be a lot more vocal about both their existence and the erasure of queerness from India’s historical heritage.
But beyond the fact that it changed the face of queer rights in India, Fire also gave us a bold, tender and deeply moving new addition to the queer cinema canon. And on June 22nd at 7:30pm, we will reignite its flame together at Paradise 🔥🔥🔥🔥
Tickets now available here, and thank you so much to Jehan Vakharia for designing this gorgeous poster for the occasion, which will be available in print at the screening.
And then…
Do you want to be part of the revolution? Well then Stephen Winter’s staggering 1996 film Chocolate Babies is absolutely required viewing. And we are offering an opportunity to see it in the best way possible: in a cinema full of queers but more importantly also with the film’s director Stephen Winter there *in person*!! Winter will sit down with QCC host Peter Knegt after the film for a Q&A.
Following a group of activists and artists (or as the movie describes them “raging, atheist, meat-eating, HIV-positive, coloured terrorists”) who band together to stage a series of surprise attacks on New York City’s conservative officials, Chocolate Babies feels just as relevant now as it did 30 years old. Bold, galvanizing and very much hilarious, Winter made one of the great cinematic responses to the AIDS crisis, and one that still has so much to offer in terms of showing us what radical resistance looks like.
So on July 22nd, let’s take it all in and then sit down with the man who created it to chat about what Chocolate Babies meant when it came out, and what it means today.
Tickets now available here. Poster created by the mighty talents of Jess Campbell, and will be available for purchase at the screening.