In the early 1990s, Lloyd Wong began to make a work based on his experiences living with AIDS in Toronto, but he died from AIDS-related illnesses before completing it. For three decades, his work-in-progress was considered “long lost” until it resurfaced at The Queer ArQuives. In this experimental documentary, Lesley Loksi Chan combines raw footage from Lloyd Wong, whom she considers to be her co-director, with fragments of her research notes, reflecting on what it means to inherit images from queer communities and to attempt to understand someone through multiple takes. Rough and unprocessed, this film explores the meaning of incompletion. Lloyd Wong, Unfinished draws attention to the daily complexities of being a Chinese Canadian gay man living with AIDS in the nineties, underscoring the power of self-representation and the tragedy of silenced voices – voices erased by systemic marginalisation and the HIV/AIDS crisis. By delving into Wong’s unfinished film, this project explores incompletion not as a failure or absence, but as a space for difficult questions, nuanced truths and ongoing dialogue about collective memory. Lloyd Wong, Unfinished is an act of intergenerational witnessing.
World Premiere: Berlinale / Berlin International Film Festival
Awards:
*Berlinale Golden Bear for Best Short Film, Germany
*Berlinale Teddy Award for Best Short Film, Germany
*Villa Medici Prix du Meilleur Film / Best Film Prize, Rome, Italy
*Nashville Film Festival Best Edge Short Film, United States
*Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal Best National Short/Mid-Length Film, Canada
International Distributor: Square Eyes info@squareeyesfilm.com
Canadian Distributor: Vtape info@vtape.org
A woman returns to the home where she lived as a pregnant teenager. Told through text, objects, found footage and assemblage sculpture, this film challenges conventional images and narratives of “teen pregnancy”, and reflects on contemporary experiences of self-representation and ways of remembering.
World Premiere: Vancouver International Film Festival
Award: York University Faculty of Graduate Studies Thesis Prize
Distributor: Vtape info@vtape.org
The arrival of a new worker to a jeans factory changes the rhythms of the workplace. This experimental mystery integrates personal and collective histories through found images and original photography reproduced on acetate, sewn together, animated by hand, projected onto a factory wall, and videotaped in Hi-8. Inspired by the filmmaker’s mother’s experiences working as a seamstress in a denim factory, this film meditates on the repetitive labour and materiality of textile work, and the im/possibilities for resistance under challenging working conditions.
World Premiere: Images Festival
Award: Images Festival Best Emerging Video/Filmmaker
Distributor: Vtape info@vtape.org
lesley loksi chan 