Screening and roundtable: Michelle Mohabeer's Queer Coolie-tudes (2019)
Malini Guha, Carleton University
The Queer Coolie-tudes event features a screening of Michelle Mohabeer’s 2019 feature-length documentary Queer Coolie-tudes and a companion roundtable that will put the filmmaker in conversation with film scholars whose expertise in experimental documentary, queer filmmaking practices, and diasporic cinemas will illuminate the ways in which Mohabeer’s work elaborates on and extends key themes and practices in contemporary radical filmmaking.
Queer Coolie-tudes is a queer ethnography which utilizes twin concepts of opacity and queer coolie-tudes to construct its decolonial aesthetics and mode of storytelling that involves testimony and an oblique queer creole narration. Mirroring, Francophone Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant's concept of opacity, to reclaim the slur of Coolie and compellingly visualize the intergenerational lives, histories, creole identities, familial relations and sexualities of a diverse range of subjects (artists, academics, and activists) from the queer Indo-Caribbean and Black Caribbean diasporas in Canada. The film is a nuanced poetics of queer Indo-Caribbean diasporic creole identities; weaving mixtures of Black and Indian, Portuguese and Indo-Caribbean, Indo Chinese-Caribbean, genderqueer, disabled and elder body, and drag gender identity performance.
The screening will take place at 10:30pm; after lunch, a roundtable will be held from 13:30 - 15:00
Michelle Mohabeer is a Guyana-born, Toronto-based award winning filmmaker/media artist and photographer. Her first feature Queer Coolie-tudes is a creative essay documentary which was released on February 1, 2019. Prior films include experimental documentaries: Blu In You (2008), Coconut/Cane & Cutlass (1994), plus various shorts Echoes (2003), Tracing Soul (2000), TWO/DOH (1996), EXPOSURE (1990) and the experimental narrative Child- Play (1996). These films have exhibited worldwide at over 400 festivals, conferences and galleries, and collected by university libraries across the U.S, Canada, the Caribbean, and Australia. Mohabeer is a lecturer at York University and her films and videos have been profiled and written about in: Film Fatales, The Romance of Transgression in Canada, North of Everything, The Bent Lens, Women’s Experimental Cinema, and Queering Canada: A Collection of Essays, The Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, among others.
