TEDDY AWARD Winner John Greyson talks about his winning movies and the influence queer films have
Channel: TEDDY AWARD
Date: 2016-04-08

"30 Years - 30 Interviews"
Birthday Greetings from John Greyson
In this interview John Greyson talks about his Teddy Award winning movies and gives us insight into how the situation for queer people changed in Canada since the late 1980s. Also he tells us about the HIV/AIDS debatte in South Africa and how his movie influenced the perception of queer people. Furthermore, he shares his unforgettable Teddy Award moments with us and wishes the Teddy Award a very happy birthday.

About the movies
Urinal
Eisenstein, Mishima, Frida Kahlo and other dead artists are uncannily summoned on a mission to probe the policing of public toilets in Ontario. They discover that, since 1981, hundreds of men have been arrested, victims of video surveillance. The key to all this seems to be a portrait of Dorian Gray. Part news story, part surreal comic invention, John Greyson's URINAL is at the cutting edge of new gay cinema: passionate, playful, complex and sharp.
More information at http://teddyaward.tv/en/archive?a-z=1...

The Making of Monsters
During his residency at the Canadian Film Centre in 1991, John Greyson, the enfant terrible of gay cinema in Canada, directed THE MAKING OF "MONSTERS" a short film dealing with the 1985 murder of a gay schoolteacher by five teenage boys in Toronto's High Park. This fictional documentary chronicles a movie-of-the-week version of the event. There is a movie-within-the-movie produced by Hungarian Marxist and literary critic and theorist Georg Lukacs and directed by Bertolt Brecht, who inexplicably appears as a catfish in a bowl.
More information at http://teddyaward.tv/en/archive?a-z=1...

Fig Trees
An operatic documentary about the struggle of two Aids activists – Canadian Tim McCaskell and South African Zackie Achmat. Both have fought tooth and nail for the provision of anti-retroviral drugs to treat Aids. In John Greyson’s film they are ably supported by Gertrude Stein, a singing albino squirrel, and St. Teresa of Ávila. FIG TREES is nonetheless based on true stories. Tim McCaskell has spent more than twenty years fighting Aids and addressing the concerns of gay men. In Johannesburg in 1999 Zackie Achmat, who is himself virus-positive, began refusing to take his medication: he said he would only continue his treatment if it were made freely available to all South Africans suffering from Aids. His symbolic act caused a stir in the international arena. His private Treatment Action Campaign soon became a nationwide movement – meanwhile his own state of health continued to deteriorate …
More information at http://teddyaward.tv/en/archive?a-z=1...

About this clip
This clip is part of a series dedicated to the 30th birthday of the TEDDY AWARD in 2016. The Teddy winners take a look back in queer film history, reflect on the meaning of a queer film prize and talk about the impact that the TEDDY AWARD had on their films as well as on their artistic lives.