CRIMINAL QUEERS!

*A Montreal Film Premiere and Directors’ Talk*

*Friday, November 13th @ 7:30pm
Concordia University, Hall Building
1455 de Maisonneuve Ouest, Room H-110
*
FREE. Wheelchair accessible.
Please get in touch 48 hours in advance if you need childcare or have other
accessibility needs: (info@qpirgconcordia.org)

*Criminal Queers* visualizes a radical trans/queer struggle against the
prison industrial complex and toward a world without walls. Remembering that
prison breaks are both a theoretical and material practice of freedom, this
film imagines what spaces might be opened up if crowbars, wigs, and metal
files become tools for transformation. Follow Yoshi, Joy, Susan and Lucy as
they fiercely read everything from the Human Rights Campaign and hate crimes
legislation to the non-profitization of social movements. *Criminal
Queers*grows our collective liberation by working to abolish the
multiple ways our hearts, genders, and desires are confined.
*
Criminal Queers* brings together powerful abolitionist voices like Angela Y.
Davis (who plays herself in the film), with a fictional, campy world of
queer insurrection. Reworking what a queer history might mean for the
possibility of surviving the present, the program centers the devastating
effects the prison industrial complex (PIC) has had on transgender/ gender
non-conforming and queer communities.

The program will include a lecture by the California filmmakers Chris Vargas
and Eric Stanley, giving historical and contemporary analysis and examples
of the ways in which queer communities are impacted by forms of state
violence; two shorts called “The Digital Storytelling Project” made by
transgender ex-prisoners, which help show the chain links between
homophobia, racism, normative gender systems and incarceration; the feature
film, *Criminal Queers*; and a question and answer period with the artists.

[Presented by QPIRG Concordia’s “Keeping it Reel” monthly Subversive Cinema Series, in
collaboration with Q-Team, the Prisoner Correspondence Project, Queer
Concordia, Queer McGill, the 2110 Centre for Gender Advocacy, and the Union
for Gender Empowerment]

*This event was also made possible, in part, by the generous support of the Arts
and Science Federation of Associations at Concordia and T. Waugh, Concordia
Research Chair in Sexual Representation.]*

*

*also be sure to check out the after-party:

qteam presents:*
*SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN/SEVEN MINUTES IN HELL*
*where the slasher flick meets spin the bottle.*

— a QUEER DANCE PARTY – afterparty for “Criminal Queers” film premiere &
director’s talk–
*”the good news is your dates are here. the bad news is…they’re dead.”
*
get in the closet this FRIDAY THE 13th of NOVEMBER
with Sarah Michelle Gellar & Neve Campbell for the kiss of death
$5 or PAY WHAT YOU CAN – nobody turned away!

LOCATION: 6595A St Urbain, metro Beaubien

you’ve seen this one before, in yer fantasies, with slightly different
characters, with slightly different props and plots… I warned you not to
go out tonight!

calling all gold star heroines, misunderstood anti-heroes, followers of The
Craft, prep school girls with cultish inclinations, urban legends on the
prowl, werewolves, nightcrawlers, men with long fingernails, creatures of
the dark, the terminally slutty, scaredy-cats, scream queens, the masked,
the chasers and the chased…

does Freddy Krueger haunt yer wet dreams?
have a one night stand with evil.
grind with villains, waltz with the dead.
be more gore, less dressed.
Scream, holler, moan.
get scared stiff.
make out with Riff-Raff.
sleep all day, party all night.
go over to the dark side.
Chucky gets lucky.

be there or suffer the consequences.
I Know What You Did Last Summer, you pervert…

a fundraiser for Open Door Books
for more information about Open Door Books, visit
http://opendoorbooks.wordpress.com/

[qteam is committed to anti-imperialism, anti-racism, short shorts, queering
activist spaces and politicizing queer spaces, the downfall of single-issue
politics, raging pervy queer dance parties, destroying all prisons, opening
all borders, burning pink dollar$, and keeping on keeping on.]