Archives have traditionally been made to fit the mainstream, often excluding and erasing marginalized voices. We’re excited to bring back the “Queering the Archive” program for a second year. In this program, we showcase films that critique and ‘queer’ the archives by presenting untold stories or reinterpreting existing footage to (re)create narratives. Each film is a statement against the exclusion of queer histories in the archives, and proposes that if the institutions won’t do it, we must safeguard our histories ourselves. Join us in Villa Concordia to discover what happens when we take control of our own stories.
Lloyd Wong, Unfinished — Lesley loksi Chan (Canada, 29 mins)
In the early 1990s, Lloyd Wong began making a work based on his experiences living with AIDS in Toronto. He passed before completing it. His work-in-progress was considered “long-lost” until it resurfaced at The ArQuives. In this documentary, Lesley Loksi Chan combines Wong’s footage with fragments of her notes to reflect on what it means to inherit images from queer communities and to attempt to understand someone through multiple takes. Rough and unprocessed, this film explores the meaning of incompletion.
comme tous les garçons — Morisha Moodley (United Kingdom, 11 mins)
comme tous les garçons meditates on images and ideas of masculinity and transmasculine identity. The film combines found footage and personal archive in an act of assemblage that mirrors the erratic and eternal piecing together of a queer identity. Showing, too, how this process first consumes, then corrupts and queers. The film attempts to trace a story of becoming, laying bare the moments of conflict along the way. What does it mean to be, or (want to) become like all the boys? And how does the spectre of Whiteness haunt this wanting?
CW: Flashing images
Atopia — Olivier de Vos (Belgium, 18 mins)
An introspective essay about the search for a place that exists between reality and imagination, made up of dreams and a longing for gender fluidity. Through a multilayered construction of archive materials, digitised as well as contemporary pictures, and original footage, De Vos charts a poetic journey to the beaches of Atopia—a placeless place, brimming with both mesmerising potentiality and impossibility.
Lasting Marks — Charli Shackleton (United Kingdom, 15 mins)
The story of sixteen men put on trial for sadomasochism in the dying days of Thatcher’s Britain was told by the police, the prosecution and the tabloid press—but not by those in the dock. In this vertical documentary, one of the 16 men recounts the story of this persecution, accompanied by archival documents that detail the court case, the media’s perspective, and the public’s opinion.
