2016 Festival

Tales from the Inside

Presented in partnership with The Glow Centre for Sexual and Gender Diversity

“Did you ever have the urge to tell a story… But did not know how to begin?
Did you ever have to write your feelings down because… You were unable to speak them?
Come and listen as we break the silence.
Come and listen…
As we lend our voices to words that were written to be heard.

After the premiere of “Tales from the Inside” at Glow’s 45th anniversary in March 2016, we are excited to be back for the Rainbow Reels festival! Members of the University of Waterloo’s Glow Centre for Sexual and Gender Diversity will take you on a journey through the colourful diversity of the queer community. A moving compilation of excerpts from LGBT+ fiction, staged as a series of monologues that is guaranteed to make you laugh, cry and everything in between. Get involved during the interactive parts of our performance or simply sit and watch as lives unfold around you. Come and listen as we tell the stories of the characters from literature and films. Tales of fear. Tales of courage.
Tales from the inside…”

Inner Pieces

Modus Vivendi Theatre presents dancers Jeff Fox, and Tyler Caughlin

The quest for inner peace is as eternal as it is complex.  Through movement and song, from Tai Chi to Tango, Jeff and Tyler explore the many different ways we pursue peace within ourselves as well with the world around us and the other people in it.

Fire Song

Presented in partnership with the Waterloo Aboriginal Education Centre

Join the Waterloo Aboriginal Education Centre in a screening of Fire Song: One of the first films by a First Nations director to deal with two-spirit people, the thoughtful and moving debut feature by Adam Garnet Jones focuses on Shane (Andrew Martin), a young Anishinaabe man at a crossroads.

Even as his family is still reeling from a recent tragedy, Shane is forced to decide whether he will leave the reservation to go to school — and he’s also faced with the prospect of raising tuition money fast, not an easy thing to do in a depressed area. (Not legally, anyway.)

With sensitivity and intelligence, Fire Song confronts some of the most pressing questions facing First Nations communities. What is it that makes a community — and is a person’s actual physical presence in that community a necessary part of it? Would Shane really be turning his back on those he cares for by leaving, or does the pressure on him to stay prohibit opportunity? Can a two-spirit person be truly accepted by a tradition-bound culture, or do exclusionary interpretations of that culture’s traditions condemn them to make a life for themselves elsewhere?

Tough yet compassionate, subtle and affecting, Fire Song announces the arrival of a powerful new voice in Canadian cinema.

Naz and Maalik

In this riveting dramatic tale, gay teens Naz and Maalik are friends, classmates, business partners and lovers. As the two closeted Muslim teens go about their regular daily routine on a Friday afternoon in Brooklyn they arouse the suspicions of an undercover FBI agent who begins to track them. This complex tale of race, religion and sexuality features a pair of tremendous performances from Kerwin Johnson Jr.as Naz and Curtiss Cook Jr. as Maalik. Intimate and meditative, Naz & Maalik examines the mysterious forces that animate teenage minds.

Stories of Our Lives

On June 30, 2013, we began collecting and archiving the stories of persons identifying as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex from Kenya. We called this project ‘Stories of Our Lives’ (the resulting archive is contained in this book) – and we wanted to do this project for many reasons, but mostly because we wanted to tell stories that are not often heard, stories that characterize the queer experience in Kenya.

After several months of touring and collecting hundreds of vivid, compelling stories, we decided to turn some of these stories into short films. We wrote the scripts based on some of the stories we’d recorded, and we shot the films over the course of eight months using ourselves as the crew. The resulting shorts were strung together into this: an anthology film based on true stories about queer life in Kenya, and our first feature film as a collective in Partnership with Uhai/EASHRI and Big World Cinema.

Suicide Kale

A simple lunch turns into a catastrophe when Jasmine and Penn, a new couple with an uncertain future, find an anonymous suicide note at the home of the happiest couple they know.