CINEMA POLITICA presents the exclusive online premiere of OUR DANCE OF REVOLUTION by director Phillip Pike.
Premiered at the 2019 Hot Docs Festival, Pike’s critically acclaimed OUR DANCE OF REVOLUTION is essential viewing on queer Black history and organizing in Canada. As the Black Lives Matter movement swept up Canadians earlier this year in an urgent reckoning with the country’s own history of systemic racism, this affirming documentary reflects on what it means to find and create place, and overcome adversity from community invisibility to police brutality.
Pike’s passionate film explores the stories of the Toronto’s queer Black community, charting a history of direct action leading up to the intervention in 2016, when Black Lives Matter stopped the Toronto Pride parade with a sit-in to call attention to the prohibitive anti-blackness of the corporate-backed event.
Through Pike’s lens, we glimpse at the impact of queer Black organizing amid the AIDS epidemic, so often written out of official histories of AIDS-related advocacy in Canada. Reminding us of anarchist Emma Goldman’s timeless declaration that a revolution without dance is not worth having, this beautiful film centers joy and creative expression with portraits of Toronto’s Church Street drag queens and the BIPOC vogueing culture that has been nurtured at the legendary House of Monroe — known as Canada’s first official ballroom.
OUR DANCE OF REVOLUTION features a celebratory collection of archival photography curated by Pike from the ArQuives, a repository of Canadian LGBTQ2+ materials, from newspapers, sound recordings and videos, banners and books, and other artifacts of queer history and activism. The viewer is taken along through memories of four decades of queer Black activism in Toronto, alongside current interviews with organizers of groups like the Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention (Black CAP), Black Lives Matter Toronto, and the Black Women’s Collective. With a narrative that dips in and out of these and other activist groups, Pike emphasizes — as he discusses in an interview with journalist Amanda Parris of CBC — the singular role played by the city’s Black Caribbean lesbian community in shaping resistance and resilience.
At heart, OUR DANCE OF REVOLUTION is a story of tenacity and perseverance within a changing city despite systemic racism and the forces of marginalization in Canada. Through the extended scenes made available for the first time by director Phillip Pike with CP On Demand, viewers have a chance to delve deeper into the stories of the activists behind Toronto’s Church Street community, from AYA, to the Blackness Yes! Collective, to the Caribbean “theatre in the streets” of Blockorama and Pelau MasQUEERade.
OUR DANCE OF REVOLUTION is also available as a CP Distribution title. Click here to obtain an educational or institutional license, or to book a screening in your community.
