Its time for MASSIMADI Canada’s premier film festival celebrating LGBTQ+ Afro cinema and arts

The Massimadi Foundation has been promoting the culture and arts of LGBTQ+ Afro communities since 2009 in Montreal Canada,. It provides a platform for showcasing artistic creations from these communities, addressing their under-representation in the mainstream cultural sphere. Through cultural mediation, the foundation fights discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals from Afro communities while supporting their arts and creative expressions.

Through art, Massimadi combats homophobia, transphobia, and racism, while fostering healing and social progress. Hoping to give back to the community, Massimadi continues to turn to the arts as a means of rediscovering joy, the wonder of life, and as a vehicle to combat homophobia, transphobia, and racism. Art, which also has a healing power, encourages us to constantly question the society around us, driving it forward.

This months sees the 16th Edition of the Massimadi Canada’s premier film festival celebrating LGBTQ+ Afro cinema and arts . This year, the festival embraces the themes of Rebirth and Resilience with a bold and inspiring lineup that highlights stories of healing, transformation, and struggle through 15 powerful films.

Two of our favorite pics from this diverse festival are :

THIS IS BALLROOM. : a feature length documentary that is both a live record of a small staged Ball held in 2022 in Niteroi, just outside Rio de Janeiro, and a history of the Ballroom movement in Brazil, including interviews with the main personalities in some of the Brazilian Houses. For the uninitiated, central to the Ballroom Movement is the creation of a safe space for multiracial queer people within what anarchist poet Hakim Bey called a TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone) This is a time and place in which the laws of normal society do not apply. Thus Ballroom becomes a home, a hospital and a church.

THE LOST BOYS: A sequence of still images of a place that seems to be a mansion into the woods introduces us to lonely Joe (Khalil Gharbia) wearing a red t-shirt. After a while we learn the residence is a juvenile reform center. Joe shares space with other mates, at the place they have professional trainers, proper meals, do sports, receive instruction and skills for life to reincorporate to society in the best way possible. Every intern longs for something and all of them obbey the rules, one of which is a prohibiton: physical contact is forbidden.

Coming from nowhere there is a new inmate, his name is William (Julien De Saint Jean) with has European roots and body and from then life is never quite the same.


MASSIMADI Foundation Film Fest begins 
on 10/23 and will end on 
10/27 To see the whole program and book 
tickets 
https://massimadi.ca/

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