By Abe Berglas
The Montreal trans film festival EXPOSURES is a place of communion, world-making, and community-building—but also, an occasion to watch film. Through its programming of trans lives over trans identities, its ‘by and for’ philosophy, and its venue dedicated entirely to the festival, EXPOSURES sets itself up as a protected space for the Montreal queer community in opposition to an increasingly hostile majority culture. The festival’s underground sanctuary was compromised when, during the pre-screening event on the first evening, CBC Montreal entered the space to report on the festival. CBC Montreal released its report, a video emission a little under two minutes, to its website where it could be found by trans people and allies, but also potentially bigots browsing the news. The counterpublic that EXPOSURES creates and the public of the CBC emission are dissonant. CBC’s narrative about human rights and acceptance politics does not translate to a counterpublic, and, in turn, the minimizing politics of the festival are compromised by the intrusion of reporters who are looking to speak to a widespread audience.
First I will properly establish that EXPOSURES is a counterpublic. Both publics and counterpublics “[come] into being through an address to indefinite strangers” (Warner 120). Publics are privileged by having this addressed to them. By virtue of being an audience to this text, participants in a public are in “an ongoing space of encounter for discourse” (Warner 90). An encounter for discourse, and a social space, is rare for marginalized and taboo groups and subjects. While public spaces are social, a counterpublic marks its participants in a way that is considered undesirable to the majority social group. Mainstream culture marginalizes this group, even as it enjoys the privileges of discourse that mirror those of a mainstream public. A counterculture will always encounter friction at a “cultural horizon,”—when discourse stops becoming broadly acceptable and elicits discomfort or rejection from a normative audience (Warner, 119). The demographic of EXPOSURES is visually distinct from that of a usual crowd. People often have dyed hair, piercings, and general modes of expressing their gender nonconformity. The festival fosters a safe space for conversations surrounding queerness and queer culture, encouraging members of the audience to be more visibly or loudly queer. The conversations I overheard were situated in a queer culture and adopted that language. These conversations were cherished because they are not able to happen anywhere. Queer people live in constant state of vigilance and brace themselves for hate crimes or discrimination, and are encouraged to assimilate with ‘straight culture’ to avoid ostracization. The cultural horizon is just beyond the doors of EXPOSURES—when attendees go home to families that are uncomfortable with their identities, or to TV footage that is clumsy and confused in their reporting on transition—they must compromise this part of their identity.
Programming on the first night of EXPOSURES, on September 19, 2024, began at 6pm for ‘Welcome Drinks,’ followed by a 7:30pm speech. The CBC crew, a reporter and a videographer, arrived at the venue at 6:20pm, and left after half an hour. The ‘Welcome Drinks’ allowed a few hours for participants to mill about the venue, make connections with other festival-goers, or buy one of the canned drinks at the bar. The attendees of the Welcome Drinks—spectators-in-waiting—share different characteristics than those there strictly for the film. This counterpublic is eager to engage in community-building, and is more likely endeared by EXPOSURES’ attempt to “turn [the venue] into a little trans haven,” according to an Instagram post (exposures.mtl, 2024). The Instagram post invited participants to bring chairs, and the organizer, Iris Pintiuta, said they were thrilled when people “camped out” (I. Minutiae, interview, October 3 2024).
The opening film, Dog Movie, is not made to shed awareness on issues concerning transgender rights. It is queer in its cast, creative team, and exploratory cinematic practices; these elements do not often cater to a straight, cisgender audience (Dog Movie). The film falls well into practices of underground cinema that Juasz outlines in “A history of the Alternative AIDS Media,” as “low-budget work that celebrates and constructs the minority culture which produces it, receives it, and which it records” (36). EXPOSURES acts as a relief from the constant labour of explaining ourselves—explaining queerness—to cisgender people as, for example, sharing pronouns is welcomed but not mandatory. The festival moves beyond the nervous, constant acknowledgment of gender diversity that queer, but majority cis spaces, can adopt.
In CBC’s published emission, interviewees do not comment on the films themselves, as they had not yet been screened. One interviewee explains that they are excited to be surrounded by transgender people and another expresses their excitement to spend all weekend there— these are desires for community (“Montreal’s first-ever trans film festival kicks off,” 0:44). The idea of spending an entire weekend in the same place, and becoming familiar, is the same process as making a home. Since most of the CBC emission is then dedicated to clips of the films featured at EXPOSURES, the narrative of the emission becomes disorienting. When the video returns at the end to shots of the venue, the audience is sparse; this counterpublic is bookended and unexplored. CBC makes no distinction between these two groups—film watchers and festival goers—nor does it try to return to the festival after a single screening.
CBC does more than (mis)report on the ‘Welcome Drinks’; it also changes the space in a way that compromises the community that EXPOSURES cultivates. Galt and Schnoover identify a majority/minority spectrum of politics that are manufactured by festival creators. Some minority events are seen as “ghettoizing,” as they isolate queerness away from the public in implied acceptance of a social hierarchy (Galt and Schnoover 91). If this is the view that EXPOSURES adopts, then CBC would perhaps signify a welcome sharing of queer culture with the broader Montreal population. However, EXPOSURES critically choses the side of exclusivity and insists that, unlike in other festivals which treat trans subjects, the creators of films are also trans. The by-and-for mentality isolates queerness, but it also seeks to deconstruct a hierarchy that positions queerness as a bottom rank. When CBC arrives, and films, we stiffen; trans people are used to code-switching—to acting differently depending on our position to the situation at hand. Our existence must be mediated through our audience, an exhausting practice that EXPOSURES attempts to relieve through the comfortable space that it fosters. Unfortunately, the audience of the CBC public is huge, and so trans people are thrust into an often unwanted spotlight.
Even if we suppose that EXPOSURES seeks to educate the wider public by bringing the queer underground into the mainstream, CBC asserts heteronormative hierarchies that undo this majoritizing project. CBC breaks the customs of the audience by modifying the architecture of EXPOSURES and by forcing spectators out of their natural paths, from sidestepping equipment to keeping out of a shot, behaviour that overrides the typical architecture of a show as a place to congregate and flow in and out of rooms. The reporter and videographer carried a buggy of equipment and set up a tripod and a light for several angles of a shot. CBC mostly set up at the entrance to the screening area that left only a sliver of the room unfilmed. I heard someone whisper, “I don’t want to get in their shot.” CBC was deferred without needing to ask for it—a reproduction of social hierarchy within a protected space. The comfort of trans folk was displaced to make more space for those watching the CBC report. The practices inherent in Dog Movie—actors in close communication with editors, enthusiastic consent to be represented, curiosity in the relationships created by characters—are absent in the shallow CBC emission. Spectators are asked: ‘why is trans representation important?’ This question is exhaustingly shallow, geared towards a cis audience, and makes assumptions about why spectators are in attendance, which is often simply to see and support trans representation.
When CBC set up a shot of the audience, they shone an LED rectangular spotlight down the aisles, blinding myself and other attendees. The spotlight felt eerily similar to the headlights of an SPVM car, that were directed at myself at the Al-Soumoud encampment earlier that Summer. The SPVM used lights as a form of intimidation—‘we know you, and you are a criminal’ were the dual messages conveyed. The brightness of the light blocks our ability to see them, making the visibility asymmetrical and making the power imbalance physical. Having recently been captured in CBC footage of protests denounced for their disruptiveness, I found CBC’s interest in myself as a spectator functionally indistinguishable from their interest in myself as a societal threat—especially since I had no idea how they would manipulate videos or images of us. Galt and Schnoover identify that to compromise one’s privacy is a threat to that person’s safety, and staying in the closet might be a survival method (97). Meanwhile, Warner uses ‘queer public’ as an example counterpublic, whereby no one is in the closet (52). Being seen in this CBC coverage can ‘out’ an individual as trans. The ‘human rights argument’ for privacy as a necessary safeguard against criminalization has different implications in Canada—a place where homosexuality is legal (Galt & Schnoover 84). This safeguard lowers the stakes of visibility but also leads to insensitivity on behalf of reporters, who did not ask consent to film, and might not realize the risks of being out. Beyond individual risk, it’s possible that further visibility will lead to widespread transphobia.
To build a counterpublic, the speech should be taboo, drawing discomfort from anyone beyond a limited audience. Warner says counterpublics “are socially marked by their participation in this kind of discourse; ordinary people are presumed not to want to be mistaken for the kind of person who would participate in this kind of talk or be present in this kind of scene” (120). The unease with which the CBC crew exists in the venue, and the unease in their reporting, affirms EXPOSURES as a counterpublic. The CBC crew did not banter or joke with organizers or participants. Perhaps most importantly, they didn’t stay for the screening, or even the welcome speech by the main organizer. Their failure to integrate allows the festival-goers to feel like part of an exclusive group. The ability of queer attendees to socially mark the CBC crew is empowering, contrasted against the expected shameful marking of queer minorities.
As experienced throughout a fraught year of increased visibility, mainstream outlets, in their attempt to flatten the nuanced trans experience, can endanger the community, even as they view themselves as allies because they have fulfilled a ‘LGBTQ content’ quota. It is disappointing to be misread by the public, in sharp distinction from the simple acceptance of other attendees, made possible through lived experience. Simultaneously, these fumbles can be sources of humour, and community. When the director of Dog Movie, Henry Hanson, complained about transness defining trans characters, it felt like an inside joke. Without a cultural horizon for EXPOSURES to scrape against, the counterpublic would be lost.
Works Cited
Dog Movie. Directed by Henry Hansen, performances by Marten Katze, Milo Talwani, and Jessi Gaston, 2024.
EXPOSURES [@exposures.mtl]. “IMPORTANT FESTIVAL INFORMATION. INFORMATIONS IMPORTANTES SUR LE FESTIVAL” Instagram. 18 Sept, 2024, https://www.instagram.com/p/DADv7ANOJNH.
Juhasz, Alexandra. “A History of the Alternative AIDS Media.” AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 1995, pp. 31-74. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822396079-003.
“Montreal’s first-ever trans film festival kicks off.” CBC News. 20 Sept, 2024, https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.6515222.
Pintiuta, Iris. Interview with the organizer. 3 October 2024.
Schoonover, Karl, and Rosalind Galt. Queer Cinema in the World. Duke University Press, 2016, http://www.dawsonera.com/depp/reader/protected/external/AbstractView/S9780822373674 .
Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. Zone Books. Project Muse, 2002, https://muse.jhu.edu/book/84464/.
“Welcome Drinks + Canadian Premiere of ‘Dog Movie.’” Exposures, 2024, https://exposuresmtl.com/.