Amélia Simard

Retrouvailles inconnues: Les francoqueers à Vancouver avant et après l'an 2000

Amélia, an emerging non-binary filmmaker, has been given 2 months given and a research grant to find out more about francophone queer life in western Canada. As the only participant from (what is colonially known as) British-Columbia and with only 3 weeks left, the pressure is on: Amélia rushes to find any traces of francophone queer people in Vancouver before the year 2000, the year they were born. Amidst this chaotic research effort, they find André, an older French-Canadian gay man that lived in Vancouver for 25 years. Through their conversations, Amélia unlocks André's hidden personal visual archive, that proves that, indeed, francophone queers were alive and thriving years before they were born. This documentary shows how Amélia put together a presentation about their own queer ancestors through screen capture, archival footage, interviews and narration that ends up changing their own view of themself as a queer french-canadian in the west.

Rascal News

Kyra and Amélia create short video capsules with a Polaroid digital camcorder; these are episodes of "Rascal News", a web show they wish to create one day. What starts in the same fashion as a news report usually ends in chaos. As they spy on their brothers and break into their neighbor's backyards, these home movies immortalize childhood friendship by offering insight into saturated vignettes that have become fond memories.