Hi!

I’ve been selected to participate in the UnionDocs Early Production Lab this summer in Brooklyn and I need your help to make this dream a reality.

The Early Production Lab at UnionDocs is a month-long documentary intensive residency program where I hope to develop my new film with the help of mentors and a committed community of fellow filmmakers.

Over the last ten years, my practice producing radio documentaries and experimental film installations has led me time and time again to one of the greatest sources of inspiration of my life: the lineages of resistance of elder queer people, particularly our responses to police violence.

This residency comes hot on the heels of my MFA thesis project at UCLA where I looked at the case of a secret society of queers raided by the police in Long Beach, California in 1914. For that project, I teamed up with historians, mollusk specialists, archaeologists, psychics, phonograph experts and folk singers to come to understand the sights and sounds of this incredibly unique club of queers through a film installation called Neptune’s Closet.

At UnionDocs, I will be developing my first project out of graduate school, this time a feature film that focuses on another story of police violence against our queer community back home in Montreal. For this story, I join elders to look at a beloved public park where the Service de Police de Montréal has conducted undercover sting surveillance operations, aggressively landscaped, clearcut of trees, lit with floodlights, patrolled with attack dogs, cars and horses, and filmed with hidden cameras.

An event of particular cruelty that took place in 1957 at the hands of the police has gone untold for too long. That act had reverberations that echoed through to the 1980s, when the park once again hosted hundreds of gay people on summer nights. It’s time that that story be told.

This film has the potential to contribute to the growing movement questioning the role of policing by providing a greater perspective of the scope of the violence surrounding our gay urban forests and the ongoing criminalization of the people who choose to meet each other there.

With your help, we will tell a difficult story that has the ability to paint a more honest portrait of who we are and where we have gathered.

I need your help to travel to New York and live and work on this film project for a month.
After moving to the United States for graduate school, my coffers are empty.
I will be forever appreciative of every dollar you can contribute to this project.

About the Summer Documentary Labs:

The Uniondocs Summer Documentary Lab are a program for a select group of media artists from the US and abroad. Based in one of NYC’s most exciting neighborhoods, Ridgewood, Queens, the Summer Labs offer a platform for participants to spend the Summer making strides and clarify the creative direction of their projects to attract the potential team members, funders and producers they need to find their way to the finish. An intensive schedule of screenings, open seminar discussions, weekly industry “field trips,” and inspiring artist visits from some of the most dynamic voices across the field of documentary, the SUMMER DOCUMENTARY LABS are tightly structured environments that bring participants into a select group of emerging filmmakers to get challenged and encouraged to think through every aspect of their works-in-progress.

Drawing inspiration from across disciplines, this intensive program should not be mistaken for an industrial, journalistic, or traditional documentary training. Scholar Scott MacDonald highlighted in The New York Times that, “UnionDocs has a healthy sense that the older definitions of what constitutes ‘experimental’ cinema and what constitutes ‘documentary’ are up for grabs.” Much emphasis is placed on workshopping lab participants’ writing about their projects as a way to both clarify the creative direction and attract potential team members, funders and producers. Participants receive focused, honest and helpful feedback on their project proposals from prominent documentary artists and industry experts.

The Early Production Lab in July is for projects about to go into production. Filmmakers have already likely shot some of their material and have access to their subjects and are looking for ways to strengthen their media samples, and pitches and work through the ideas as they approach the production stage and plan for the entire process all the way through to distribution.