Event

NANG BY NANG screening at Reel Asian Festival*

NANG BY NANG screening at Reel Asian Festival*

Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space, 401 Richmond,4th floor

6:30pm

(*with presentation partner Vtape)

Nang has always lived outside the box.

Born in a Trinidadian village in 1934, she grew up poor, illegitimate, mixed-race and female, yet she survived and thrived by defying convention. She left her first of five husbands after he cheated on her. With no formal training, she danced with choreographer Geoffrey Holder, who later won Tony Awards for The Wiz. In her twenties, she went to work in the Orinoco delta in Venezuela, and saved enough to buy a house. She attended university in New York in her 40s. Through her stubbornness, resourcefulness and resilience, Nang has surmounted life’s traumas and tragedies. In this vivid portrait, filmmaker Richard Fung gets to know Nang, his previously unknown first cousin, at her current home in New Mexico and on the road in Trinidad.

Kristine Estorninos, Head of Programming,Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival

Nang by Nang, 2018, 40:19 Richard Fung, Canada, Trinidad.

Following the screening, director Richard Fung will be in conversation with artist and Vtape Artistic Director Lisa Steele. In considering this lovely, spirited portrait – or rather, as the title indicates, self-portrait – of Richard Fung’s cousin Nang, Lisa Steele will look at the connection of this work to the other works by Fung that investigate his family and their histories, from The Way to My Father’s Village, to My Mother’s Place to Islands to the hauntingly poignant Sea In the Blood. She will pose the questions: What is in a name? What does it mean to be a family? What role does place play in an individual’s sense of self?

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Richard Fung is an artist and writer born in Trinidad and based in Toronto. He is a Professor in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University, teaching in Integrated Media and Art and Social Change. His work comprises challenging videos on a wide range of subjects including the role of the Asian male in gay pornography, colonialism, immigration, racism, homophobia, AIDS, justice in Israel and Palestine, and his own family history.

Lisa Steele is an artist working primarily in video, photography and installation. She has worked in collaboration with Kim Tomczak since 1983, is a founder of Vtape where she continues as the Artistic Director, and teaches at the University of Toronto in Visual Studies Program in the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

image credit: Richard Fung, Nang By Nang, 2018