In-person at Tranzac Club, 292 Brunswick Ave, Toronto. ASL available.
Presented in partnership with Archive/CounterArchive, Vtape, and PUBLIC
Toronto Living With AIDS: Finding a Future in the Past is a roundtable/book launch for an edited volume on the community cable television series Toronto Living With AIDS (TLWA). TLWA was distributed on cable in Toronto from 1990-1991 and consisted of 12 half-hour tapes produced by a diverse array of artists working in collaboration with community organizations. These tapes were visionary collaborations made under the duress of a deadly pandemic made worse by institutionalized homophobia, racism, sexism, and colonization. Examining how these tapes were made and the impact they had demonstrates possible roadmaps for future community-based media collaborations determined to save our own lives. This event features surviving contributors to the series and researcher/book editor Ryan Conrad.
Ryan Conrad is an activist, artist, and teacher living in the Outaouais. He has been doing activism, researching, writing, and making films about HIV/AIDS for nearly two decades. His edited volume on the Toronto Living With AIDS community cable television series comes out of a multi-year collaboration with Vtape and Archive/Counter-Archive. This work, and all his other work is archived online at faggotz.org.
Kaspar Jivan Saxena, AOCA, is an independent video/animation director, visual storyteller, photographer, curator and scholar who has received television, theatrical, university and grassroots screenings around the world since 1989. Kaspar has also been researching topics related to the visual histories of mythical creatures and monsters since 1994 for an ongoing multiplatform creative research archive project and is currently completing a Master’s thesis/ graphic novel on extreme monster imagery in pre-modern Europe. See Kaspar’s full CV at https://yorku.academia.edu/KasparSaxena/CurriculumVitae
Darien Taylor has been living with HIV since the late 1980s. She was one of the founders of Voices of Positive Women, a provincial health organization led by and for women living with HIV. Her films and publications include Positive Women: Women Living with AIDS, Voices of Positive Women, and Virus Queen. Darien has also been involved in HIV work with organizations such as AIDS ACTION NOW!, the AIDS Committee of Toronto and CATIE, Canada’s HIV information source. She has received recognition for her work as a recipient of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal.
Ian Iqbal Rashid is an activist, poet, and filmmaker. Notable work includes writing and co-executive producing the Peabody and Canadian Screen Award-winning comedy Sort Of writing the BAFTA-winning drama This Life, and directing critically acclaimed Sundance films Touch of Pink and How She Move. Ian is currently adapting Nobel winner Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives as a UK-German TV series. Accolades include the Writers Guild of Britain Award for TV Writing, the Aga Khan Excellence in the Arts Award, and the UK Film Council’s Breakthrough Brit Award. Literary contributions include Black Markets, White Boyfriends, an award-winning poetry book. He co-founded and directed the inaugural Desh Pardesh, Canada’s pioneering South Asian arts festival.
Toronto Living With AIDS: Finding a Future in the Past is part of the Toronto Queer Film Festival 2024 Symposium: Visions of Care and Collaboration.
During the annual festival season, TQFF’s Industry Programming team invites artists, writers, and community workers to host radical and innovative learning opportunities for free to the public. This is the first year since 2019 where we are offering in-person programming again with a hybrid, online format. All events will be livestreamed and accessible in the TQFF video-on-demand archive.
Visions of Care and Collaboration brings forward the hope of building a community full of love, respect, and growth. The current state of the world is crumbling with public health abandonment, dirty politics, and pushing bootstraps ideologies of individualism in service of capitalist accumulation and resource hoarding. Visions of Care and Collaboration imagines a world where taking care of each other becomes a revolutionary act: engaging in mutual aid, prioritizing community, and dismantling consumerism. We create space for conversations around needs, necessary changes, and how to develop relationships with each other and our environments. We want to see a world where we acknowledge each other’s struggles, but are there for each other with support and new ways of thinking.
Join us for an exciting weekend full of workshops, panels, presentations and performances by and for queer and trans creators.
Visit TQFF.ca for more info.
