Learning Skills and Making Video About the LGBTQ+ Migrant Journey

In December 2019, we collaborated with Lokchi Lam, a videomaker and media instructor originally from Hong Kong, to organize a series of six workshops with LGBTQ+ asylum-seekers affiliated with the MCC Church.

The workshops were held at Ryerson University and provided basic video recording and storytelling skills to around 30 participants. The experience resulted in a 10-minute documentary film that tells the story of a professional class of Black LGBT people who have escaped harrowing, hair-raising experiences of discrimination, shunning, tribal threats of torture, abuse, and hate crimes, only to come here and be told that their education and their professional experience is worth next to nothing.

Participants came from a wide variety of professional backgrounds including, banking, retail, management, business, parenting – but they were all eager to learn new skills and perfect them.

Workshop sessions focused on three-point lighting, camera operation, sound recording, the art of the interview, writing monologues, and editing. We also spent time brainstorming and discussing the main themes, which were identified as housing, employment, and the interminable refugee determination process. This often led to heated discussion, and provided a way for the participants to express some of their frustrations with governments, racist landlords, and the colonial structure of “Canadian experience”. Participants really wanted to depict the struggles they had experienced through a very gentle and organic process of interviewing. They were also keen to show the joy and relief of being in Canada.

The workshop series culminated in the production of a 10 minute film, which was edited by Karen Vanderboght, also a migrant. In it, stories of Black LGBT people who have escaped harrowing, hair-raising experiences of discrimination, shunning, tribal threats of torture, abuse, and hate crimes, are explored.