John Greyson — Director (9)

Movie

A Moffie Called Simon (1986)
A Moffie Called Simon IMDb TMDB
A collage of found footage from different media presenting the case of Simon Nkodi, a black gay activist and student leader in South Africa, who had been in jail for two years when the film was produced. Exploring the connections between anti-apartheid struggles and gay liberation, A Moffie Called Simon is based on letters from Nkodi to his lover, Ray, a Canadian gay journalist.

Movie

Urinal (1988)
Pissoir WikiData IMDb TMDB
other title: 便池 / Pissoir …
A mystery man brings together a group of dead, gay artists to investigate a police response to the dilema of wash-room sex in Toronto. The artists have seven days in which to report on the ethics of police tactics. The artists infiltrate the police only to discover that they themselves are under surveillance as a political subversive group. The artists explore and report on the evolution of toilets and wash-room behavior.

Movie

The Making of Monsters (1991)
The Making of Monsters Douban
约翰·葛雷森 actor: Christopher Anderson / Ray Kahnert …
other title: 怪物制造
1985年,同性恋教师肯尼斯·泽勒斯在多伦多的高公园被五个男孩谋杀。在他的实验音乐剧《加拿大电影恐怖少年》中,约翰·格雷森对这个案例进行了全面的、积极的分析。格雷森运用布莱希特的诽谤策略和大量的挑衅,以一部虚构的记录片的形式重现了事件的过程和围绕事件的媒体炒作,记述了一部关于谋杀的电影的制作过程。反过来,他使用了许多不同的风格,包括新闻报道、舞台剧、档案片段和音乐视频序列的元素,颠覆了这一点。其结果是对同性恋恐惧症的一个激进的、多层次的研究,它以具有讽刺意味的尖刻风格突破了白人的非标准化。布莱希特本人以一条鱼的形象出现在导演的位置上,而那些戴着冰球棍和守门员面具的骑师们点燃了一支充满愤怒和自决魅力的奇异生命之火。 In 1985, gay teacher Kenneth Zellers was murdered by five teenage boys in High Park, Toronto. In his experimental musical, John Greyson, enfant terrible of Canadian cinema, undertakes a comprehensive, activist’s analysis of the case. Employing Brecht’s strategies of defamiliarisation and an exuberant dose of provocation, Greyson reconstructs both the course of events and the media hype surrounding them in the form of a fictitious documentary that chronicles the making of a film about the murder. This, in turn, is subverted by his use of a number of different styles – including elements of news reports, staged drama, archive footage and music video sequences. The result is a radical, multi-layered study of homophobia that cuts through the thicket of white heteronormativity with bitterly ironic flair. Bertolt Brecht himself appears as a director in the guise of a fish, while dancers in jockstraps with ice hockey sticks and goaltender masks ignite a firework of queer joie de vivre, full of anger and self-determined charisma.

Movie

无花果树 (2009)
Fig Trees Douban
other title: Fig Trees
Drenched in equal measures of joy and grief, this documentary opera - a tribute to the warrior saints of AIDS activism - will make you weep, rage, and sing, maybe all at once. Director John Greyson gleefully riffs on Gertrude Stein's subversive 1934 opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, to create a glorious mélange of palindromes, saints and criminals and a cameo by Queen West's albino squirrel. Winner of a Teddy Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, the film features Toronto's Tim McCaskell, one of the founders of AIDS Action Now, who has been living with AIDS for 25 years and South Africa's Zackie Achmat. HIV-positive, Achmat began a treatment strike in 1999, refusing to take life saving anti-retrovirals until they were accessible to all South Africans. With beautiful rage and a resplendent score by collaborator David Wall, Greyson takes aim at the political vacuum and outrageous greed of pharmaceutical companies that allowed millions to die when they could have lived.

Movie

Zero Patience (1993)
Zero Patience WikiData IMDb TMDB Douban
John Greyson actor: 约翰·罗宾森 / Normand Fauteux …
other title: 爱之风暴 / 浪漫風暴 …
The ghost of "patient zero", who allegedly first brought AIDS to North America - materialises and tries to contact old friends. Meanwhile, the Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton, who drank from the Fountain of Youth and now works as Chief Taxidermist at the Toronto Natural history Museum, is trying to organise an exhibition about the disease for the museum's "Hall of Contagion".

Movie

Proteus (2004)
Proteus Douban
other title: 挛爱砒霜 / 海神之恋
故事发生在1735年的荷兰好望角,一次偶然中,植物学家尼温(肖恩·史密斯 Shaun Smyth 饰)救下了正在逃跑的黑奴布兰克(鲁斯奈·布朗 Rouxnet Brown 饰),为了报答尼温的救命之恩,布兰克决定同尼温一起前往罗本岛,替尼温效劳。 在罗本岛,布兰克结识了同为努力的荷兰水手杰克彼(尼尔·桑迪兰兹 Neil Sandilands 饰),据说杰克彼是一名同性恋者,因此布兰克对他十分的提防。但随着时间的推移,布兰克渐渐在杰克彼的身上发现了与众不同的闪光点,杰克彼也透过布兰克冷酷的外表发掘出了他善良的内心。一场意料之外的醉酒让布兰克和杰克彼之间的距离迅速拉近,两人之间的感情很快就超越了友谊。