Second Eulogy: Mind the Gap screening with filmmaker Billy Frank, Q&A Moderated by Warren Critchlow
Public Events Program
Inspired by radical new poetic methods of digital and intermedial storytelling, transgressive visual techniques emerging from new media platforms, and new activisms engaging with theories of homonationalism, pinkwashing and a global queer (un)commons, the QSI offers students immersion in the debates, voices, ideas and images of the current queer/trans digital moment. The Institute features two, interconnected graduate courses: THST 6350: Performing the Queer (Un)commons, taught by Mary Bunch and FILM 5020: Global Queer Cinemas Confront the Pink Line, taught by John Greyson.
Co-presented by the Queer Summer Institute in Research Creation and Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts & Technology. Thank you to our partners and sponsors: SSHRC, The Hemispheric Encounters Partnership Grant, VISTA, Peripheral Visions Co-Lab, AMPD’s Office of the Associate Dean of Research, TIFF, Pleasuredome, the ArQuives, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, and Experience York. Banner photo by Katie Rainbow on unsplash.com
Members of the public are invited to join the group for several open events.
Second Eulogy: Mind the Gap screening with filmmaker Billy Frank, Q&A Moderated by Warren Critchlow
TUESDAY May 17, 2022
7:00 – 10:00PM
Nat Taylor Theatre (N102 Ross Building, York University)
FREE
Mind The Gap is an autobiographical de-construction and re-positioning of personal memories of the father. It gives a voice by de-contextualizing and de-constructing the mythologies and legacies of the present/absent one. 2nd Eulogy: Mind The Gap spurns personal tales of loss, longings, memories, and the phantasmagoria by interweaving fiction and non-fiction to conjure an abstract story of interconnected lives. The central tale narrates the lives of Nelson, a fisherman and father; his gay son James who is coming of age in a verdantly charged landscape; Antoinette, Nelson’s wife who embodies the island’s colonial past and Mother Country; and their maid, Josephine. Apart from telling the personal story around the father, it explores personal experiences of growing up as a gay teenager in Grenada: the ridicule; the sexual molestation; the trauma.
Billy Gerard Frank (born in Grenada) is a Multi-Media Artist, Filmmaker, and Film Curator— An autodidact living in New York. He was recently selected to represent Grenada at 58th La Biennale di Venezia 2019 and is also one of the artists in the collective representing the island at 59th La Biennale di Venezia 2022. Frank’s practices mine personal memories, political, and social histories and challenge dominant and normative discourses around them. His research-based work addresses issues of migration, race, and global politics as they relate to gender, minority status, and post-colonial subjects. He moved to London as a teenager, where he began painting and exploring experimental video art and installation before moving to New York to pursue further studies in studio art at atelier like The Art Students League of New York, The National Academy of Fine Arts, and filmmaking at The New School for Social Research.
His collected, altered, and own mixed media artworks and films have been exhibited in groups and solo shows in galleries and Institutions like The Brooklyn Museum (2020) and is in several private collections and institutions like the National Academy Museum of Fine Arts and Design. Over the years, he has been an artist-in-residence at several artist residencies. Frank is also the founder of Nova Frontier Film Festival & LAB that showcases films and arts from and about the African Diaspora, the Middle East, and Latin America. As an educator, he has lectured at universities like the School of Visual Arts, New York University, and he is a Lecturer/Faculty in Design and Directing at David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University.
Since 2005, after studying filmmaking and media arts at The New School University, Frank has worked as a writer, director, and production designer, in both narrative and documentary films that were screened at international film festivals, like Sundance and Berlinale. His narrative short film, Absence Of Love, which he wrote and directed, premiered at the Palm Springs International Short Film Festival, shown in over 50 international film festivals. He was nominated for a European Music Video award in the category of Production Design for his design of Warner Music Group artist. He is presently in development on two narrative feature films. Frank currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
