Co-Directors: Fay Nass & Jen Sungshine

a frank theatre company and Love Intersections co-production

Premiering Online August 22 2022

13:07 | 2022 | Canada | English, Spanish, Mandarin & Cantonese

With Closed Captioning & Translations in English

What if there’s no word for queer in your mother tongue? What if you dream in Cantonese but struggle to speak it in your waking life? What If is a poignant, visually-arresting conversation between five queer immigrants. Featuring community participants with Cantonese, Mandarin and Spanish as their native tongues, this short film investigates the freedoms and limitations of existing between cultures. If “to know two languages is to possess a second soul,” (Charlemagne), how can our multi-lingual selves co-exist within Western assimilation and homonormativity?

Background

What If is part of a larger community creation, Mother Tongues, produced by the frank theatre in collaboration with participants, MOSAIC, and Love Intersections. Mother Tongues works with LGBTQ+ artists and community members, addressing their experiences as people with English as an Additional Language (EAL). Mother Tongues investigates how language shapes identity, gender and sexuality, exploring notions of queerness outside of English-speaking contexts. 

The vision for this project is to celebrate the diversity of languages that one speaks, and to create space for stories that exist outside of academic and Anglophone notions of queerness. 

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Community Participants
Cindy Kao, Ada Yim, Elías Arce Gutiérrez, Camila Roman Torres, and Daniela Roman

Artistic Team
Co-directors: Fay Nass & Jen Sungshine

Curator: Fay Nass

Facilitator: Jen Sungshine

Editor: David Ng

Videographer: Eric Sanderson

Music Composer: Taymaz Saba

Sound Designer: Esther Gadd

frank theatre producers: Fay Nass and Anais West