Artist

Don Bapst

The short films of Don Bapst use experimental cinema techniques within a narrative structure to give a voice to the marginalized and the forbidden. "Chris," his short bilingual film about a cisgendered gay man’s romantic encounter with a transman, earned the filmmaker a Best Up and Coming Toronto Film Maker award at InsideOut in 2010. That same year, his hybrid documentary "How to Immigrate to Canada" become a part of the archives at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier One in Halifax. "Modeled," his 2012 portrait of photographer G. Elliott Simpson, was shot in a mixture of high-definition video, 16 mm, and Super 8 and explored the role sex and art play in transcending the violence of homophobia. That same year, his documentary poem "Good Grief" incorporated archival Super 8 footage into a personal portrait of the role of art in the grieving process. In 2023, Bapst earned an MFA from York University where he made "Doppelgänger" as his thesis film. The filmmaker is also a novelist, playwright, and translator, whose English translation of Gabrielle Wittkop’s "Le Nécrophile" was called a “masterpiece” by "The Guardian." Bapst earned his first MFA in 1991 from Brooklyn College where he studied under the direction of the late Allen Ginsberg.

Artist Code: 1003

Videography

Doppelgänger

2023, 10:00 minutes, colour, English

Three Haiku

2022, 07:00 minutes, colour, English

Modeled

2011, 07:45 minutes, colour/B&W, English

Good Grief

2011, 14:15 minutes, colour/B&W, English

How To Immigrate To Canada

2010, 39:41 minutes, colour, English

A Haunted House

2010, 07:15 minutes, B&W, English

Chris

2009, 04:10 minutes, colour, English with French Subtitles

Loverman

2007, 07:30 minutes, B&W, English

Judgment

2006, 06:17 minutes, B&W, English