Faculty of Art
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. Registration recommended. <http://www.sfu.ca/itcr/events/fung-registration.html>
The film will be screened with open captioning and ASL interpretation will be provided for the panel discussion.
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.
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.
For more details about the event: <http://www.sfu.ca/itcr/events/RichardFung.html>
