08 May Gavin Seal
May’s #MainArtist and member of Main Film since 2014, Gavin Seal joins us to share his vision of languages, creativity and the worlds of possibility that engage with them, as well as the often invisibilized experiences that can arise from characters and stories with multiple facets and identities.
In addition to his contribution to the #MainArtist forum, Gavin is currently completing his short film produced with the support of Main Film as part of the (tri)Cycle! creative support program.
Gavin Seal is a Writers Guild of Canada prize-winning filmmaker. His work often captures his intersectional Indian-Québécois-Canadian heritage, with multiracial, multilingual characters exploring themes of belonging as they challenge cultural norms, traditions, and social codes.
His films have screened internationally at festivals including Fantasia, Hot Docs, Reelworld and Just for Laughs. He is an alumnus of the TIFF Filmmaker Lab, Reelworld Emerging 20 Writers program, Berlinale EFM’s Fiction Toolbox, and EAVE Access BIPOC Producers program in partnership with the National Screen Institute.
- The Tides That Bind Us, Short Film, Drama, Intersectionnel Films, 2024
- Followers, Short Film, Horror-Comedy, CBC, 2021
- Case Claus’d, Short Film, Neo-noir Christmas, CBC, 2015
Coming out as Bi in Québec
❝ I’ve gotta get something off my chest…
Beat.
I’m bi…
He clears his throat.
…lingual…
Wow, it feels so good to say it out loud ;p
I’m not an Anglophone. I’m not a Francophone. I’m bilingual and I’m writing this shortly after being forced to remove French (you read that right, French, not English) from a screenplay because it didn’t fall into one SODEC juror’s belief that my characters should fit into a box as either Anglophones or Francophones.
Montréal is Canada’s most trilingual city and it’s about time Québecois cinema celebrates the cognitive diversity that makes our culture so rich. I can’t even imagine how infuriating this must be for Indigenous artists whose only options for submission are colonial languages. Telefilm has already removed this criteria because it doesn’t represent the contemporary landscape of our culture and it’s about time the Québec funders did the same. With Telefilm, the script still needs to be translated into one of the two official languages for the readers/jurors but the film can be whatever language the writer wants to write in.
Artists are united by curiosity. We share an unquenchable thirst for learning through the creative process of curiosity, courage, and experimentation, audiences discover that we have more in common than we could ever express in words.
As David Rose famously said on Schitt’s Creek, “I do drink red wine, but I also drink white wine and I’ve been known to sample the occasional rose.” But even that’s overly reductive in a world where orange wine, Champagne, and Cava are on the menu.
So let’s raise a glass to more bilingual, trilingual and multilingual films.
Besides, cinema is the one true universal language, right?
Take that, “Math!” ❞
Gavin Seal
#MAINARTIST
Our organization is an artist-run center committed to supporting its community as a whole, without distinction.
Beyond the simple declarations of solidarity against racism following the events of the summer of 2020, but also against more recent racist acts and those that persist historically, it seemed essential to us to offer a place to our members so that they can express their feelings in the face of the discrimination they experience and which could be based on the color of their skin, their origins, their sexual orientation, their gender or a handicap.
We invite them to share their thoughts on this societal drama that constitutes all forms of rejection of the other.
Main Film is an artist-run center committed to supporting its community as a whole, without distinction, in the creation of independent film.
Our 25th contributing artist is Gavin Seal.
#MainArtist #ArtisteImportant
Because it is artists who carry both the role of representing society and making it evolve.