Sunday, April 13, 2025
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Curated by Jaclyn Quaresma
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Work by John Greyson
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Images Festival, Toronto
Co-Presented with Toronto Queer Film Festival (TQFF), Art Metropole, and Canadian Film and Media Distribution Centre (CFMDC).
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A conversation between Chase Joynt and John Greyson will follow the program. ASL Interpreters will be present.
Mars takes approximately two Earth years to complete its orbit around the Sun, while Venus takes about seven and a half months. Despite their different cycles, every 18-24 months, the two mythically-linked planets align and create opportunities for astrologically significant events. Love, desire, creativity, strategic action, and will power are activated here on Earth reflecting the fraught, storied interplay between Mars’ passion and Venus’ harmony.
A “Double Mars-Venus Transit” is when both Mars and Venus are simultaneously moving from one astrological position into another, while still being in relation to each other, twice in a short period of time. As Mars and Venus dance above, those earthly manifestations of love, desire, creativity, strategic action, and will power become ever more activated, pushed and pulled. If these two planets are conjunct, this is good; if they are square, watch out! If they move from one into another, well then there is potential for chaos and grave misunderstanding.
Filmmaker and activist John Greyson begins his latest feature film Door Prize under this starscape. The sustainable, safe future promised by “green” transit solutions is called into question as John brings together brilliant scenes in colour and black-and-white, silence and full audio, from so-called Toronto to the Thar desert. Created in close collaboration with Chase Joynt, this film spans documentary, drama, and space opera, as it follows the death of Mars Brito—a fictional trans bike courier—through a citywide, gamified, true-crime crusade.
As Mars Brito’s death is investigated, another narrative unfolds with the same actors playing different characters. Centered around another person named Mars—not a bike courier this time, but a fictional trans activist—a community of comrades and opera singers create a memorial for the real-life 375 trans folks who were murdered worldwide in 2021.
Under the influence of the double Mars and Venus transits, Door Prize contributes to urgent conversations about trans activism, queer solidarity, and the politics of putting murder on screen. At a time when many Canadian conservative leaders are building their campaign platforms on the disavowal of gender diversity beyond a false binary, the Right’s push to reduce national healthcare treatment standards for gender-based care, as well as the Ontario Premier’s false accusations of indoctrination in schools when administrators respect a student’s right to bodily autonomy, and when recalling that a reported 59% of transgender and gender-diverse adults living in so-called Canada experience violent victimization, it is easy to fall into the chaos of John’s fictionalized astrology.
This whirling film deftly addresses media spectacle, trans visibility, and anti-trans violence while maintaining its commitment to solidarity—never speaking for and always speaking with.
Door Prize, John Greyson 2024 | 140 min | English, ASL | Canada
Mars Brito, a trans bike courier, is killed by an SUV. Is he the victim of an accidental ‘door prize’, or is this murder? His case becomes a city-wide obsession, with hourly true crime updates and rewards for clues. While this murder mystery unfolds, a Toronto trans activist (also named Mars) works with his friends on an operatic memorial, creating arias for each of the 375 trans murders that were committed around the world that year.
John Greyson is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and recipient of the 2000 Toronto Arts Award for film/video as well as the 2007 Bell Award in Video Art, John Greyson is a queer filmmaker, video artist, writer, activist, and educator whose productions have won accolades at festivals throughout the world.
Chase Joynt is a non-fiction filmmaker and writer who works at the edges of genre. His documentary feature, Framing Agnes, was named a Best Movie of the Year by The New Yorker after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival where it won the NEXT Innovator Award and the NEXT Audience Award. The film has played more than 100 festivals internationally and is distributed by Kino Lorber. With Aisling Chin-Yee, Chase co-directed No Ordinary Man, which was presented at Cannes Docs as part of the Canadian Showcase of Docs-in-Progress. Since premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, No Ordinary Man has been hailed by The New Yorker as “a genre unto itself” and Indiewire as “the future of trans cinema.” For the CW, Chase directed episodes of Two Sentence Horror Stories which are now streaming on Netflix; his episode Elliot from Season 2 won a Telly Award for directing in 2022. He is the co-author of two non-fiction books: the Lambda Literary Award Finalist You Only Live Twice with Mike Hoolboom and Boys Don’t Cry with Morgan M Page. His latest book Vantage Points was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust of Canada Prize for Nonfiction and named a Best Book of the Year by CBC Books, The Walrus and Autostraddle.
Jaclyn Quaresma 