Film Screening : Michelle Mohabeer’s Queer Coolie-tudes

The film Queer Coolie-tudes (87 mins) will be screened through the CFMDC.TV website and projected at 4th Space, following with a discussion with the filmmaker at 4:30pm.

Michelle Mohabeer was born in Guyana/South American and lives in Toronto, she is a multi award-winning filmmaker/media artist, film scholar, academic and writer who earned her PhD from the University of Toronto in (2006). She was recognized as “best female filmmaker 2020” by the Berlin Underground Film Festival for her second creative feature documentary, Queer Coolie-tudes (2019), which was awarded Direction Excellence from Docs Without Borders and won the “Intersect Award” from the 15th Caribbean Tales International Film Festival. Queer Coolie-tudes had its Canadian premiere at the 28th Inside Out Film Festival and its European premier in the media library collection of the 50th Visions du Reel in Switzerland and theatrically at the International Queer and Migrant Film Festival in Amsterdam. Prior films include the feature essay documentary, Blu In You (2008), the Inside Out commissioned short film Echoes (2003), the Canada Council/Making Scenes Ottawa commissioned Tracing Soul (2000), her MFA experimental narrative, Child-Play (1996), TWO/DOH (1996), Coconut/Cane & Cutlass (1994), and the commissioned Five Feminist Minutes short, EXPOSURE (1990) which was produced by the National Film Board of Canada (former-studio D women’s unit). 

Mohabeer’s films have exhibited worldwide at over 300 festivals, conferences, and galleries, and collected by over 60 University libraries across the U.S, Canada, and in the Caribbean. Her films have been profiled or written about in Film Fatales: Independent Women Directors, The Romance of Transgression in Canada, North of Everything, The Bent Lens, Queering Canada: A Collection of Essays, and the article, “Putting the Cool in Coolie: Disidentification, Desire and Dissent in the work of filmmaker, Michelle Mohabeer” in The Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, among others. Dr. Mohabeer teaches at York University in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and in the Department of Communications at Glendon campus. Future projects include: a feature documentary, and she is the contributing editor of a critical anthology,  In-Between the Frames: Racialized Diasporic & Queer Diasporic women filmmakers in Canada.

Film Description

Queer Coolie-Tudes, Canada/Guyana / 1:27:00 / 2019 / sound / colour / English

Queer Coolie-tudes is a creative essay documentary and queer ethnography which traces the intergenerational lives, histories, identities, familial relations and sexualities of a diverse range of subjects (academics, artists, and activists) from the Indo-Caribbean diaspora in Canada. Some are mixed race, including: dougla (Indian-African mixture), callaloo (creole mixtures)), genderqueer, disabled, aids activist, and perform drag identity.

CFMDC.TV  will rebroadcast its 2021 program, SuperWomen: Conversations with the Real Action Figures (2021), during the June 12 to 16 panel series.

This is a collection of interviews with seven astounding women who have an extensive history of working in film and video with Marjorie Beaucage, Christene Browne, Sylvia Hamilton, Maria Teresa Larrain, Michelle Mohabeer, Leila Sujir, and Zainub Verjee in conversation with Midi Onodera.