Richard Fung

The ghost of "patient zero", who allegedly first brought AIDS to North America - materialises and tries to contact old friends. Meanwhile, the Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton, who drank from the Fountain of Youth and now works as Chief Taxidermist at the Toronto Natural history Museum, is trying to organise an exhibition about the disease for the museum's "Hall of Contagion".

Dirty Laundry speculates upon the buried narratives of gender and sexuality in Chinese-Canadian history of the 19th century, when Chinese communities were almost exclusively male. A story about a chance late-night encounter between a steward and a passenger on a train interweaves with documentary interviews with historians and writers and historical documents brought to life. The tape poses nagging questions about the personal and political stakes in the writing of history and in our interpretations of the past.

Best known for his work in video, Richard Fung has made the politics of gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation his central focus. Chinese Characters (1986) examines the ambiguous relationship of gay Asian men with white gay porn.

Islands is an experimental video that deconstructs a film by John Huston to comment on the Caribbean‚s relationship to the cinematic image. A story of unrequited love by a shipwrecked American marine (Robert Mitchum) for an Irish nun (Deborah Kerr), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison is set in 1944 in the Pacific, but is shot in 1956 in Tobago using Trinidadian Chinese extras to portray Japanese soldiers. The artist’s uncle Clive is one such extra.

In 1915, two Sikh mill-workers, Dalip Singh and Naina Singh, were entrapped by undercover cops and accused of sodomy. Their story becomes a fascinating case study of Vancouver power relations: how police corruption, racism, homophobia, and a covert "whites-only" immigration policy, conspired to maintain the status quo of this colonial port city. Told in four parts, by three separate directors, the film is a hybrid of film forms including drama, documentary and musical.

In 1984, Richard Fung released his seminal first documentary Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Asians. Featuring 14 women and men in Toronto of South, East and Southeast Asian backgrounds, Orientations was the first documentary to explore the experiences and perspectives of queer Asians in North America. Capturing pivotal moments in Toronto’s history, it presents an intimate portrait of the texture of gay live and politics at that time. Re:Orientations revisits seven of the original participants as they see anew the footage of their younger selves, and reflect on their lives and all that has changed over the intervening three decades. Their interviews are deepened and contextualized by conversations with six younger queer and trans activists, scholars and artists.

With a travel ban in place, Richard and his partner Tim, are stranded as the only guests in a small riad in the Dades Valley in southeast Morocco.

A two-headed monster grabs a little girl's backpack, which leads to a transformation.

A Gay Men’s Health Crisis sex education PSA in which an interracial gay male couple hooks up at a bath house, having steamy sex safely.

Jehad Aliweiwi is a Palestinian Canadian who lives in Toronto but regularly returns to visit his family in Hebron. Rendered on two screens, Jehad in Motion is a double portrait both of the man and of the two cities he calls home. In Hebron, Jehad takes us to the old market where Jewish settlers have colonized the upper stories forcing Palestinians to build a horizontal fence to protect themselves. In Toronto, we walk around Thorncliffe Park where he works providing services in one of the city’s key neighbourhoods for newly arrived immigrants. In Hebron, he celebrates his sister’s wedding at a feast for one thousand people. In Toronto, he cooks at a Passover Seder for peace. Jehad synthesizes the challenges and possibilities in these two very different but overlapping worlds. Jehad in Motion ruminates on diaspora, urban space, and the interpenetration of politics and cultures. It is also an intervention into the practices of documentary media, portraiture and installation art.

Best known for his work in video, Richard Fung has made the politics of gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation his central focus. Orientations (1984) deald explicitly with gay issues, sn ambitious study considering racism and cultural self-assertion through art, coupled with stories of individual experiences,

Growing up in Trinidad, Richard Fung loved dal puri roti. In this epic culinary quest he sets out to discover where this spicy flat bread was born. His journey takes him from the central plains of Trinidad to the Bhojpur region of India, and finally to the snowy streets of Toronto, Canada.

On January 8, 1989 a Pickering, Ontario flea market was robbed. Witnesses reported the robbers consisted of one white male and four Blacks. Later that day, police disrupted a Scarborough church service, arresting one South Asian boy and four Black youths including a girl of thirteen. All were later released when it was proven that they were in church when the robbery occurred. Julien Didier was twenty at the time and the oldest of the arrested. This tape follows his experience of the events.

Nang has written her own script. Born in the Trinidadian village of Basse Terre in 1934, she grew up poor, illegitimate, mixed-race and female, but she survived by defying convention. She left the first of five husbands when he cheated on her. With no formal training, she danced with choreographer Geoffrey Holder, who later won Tony Awards for The Wiz. In her twenties, she went to work in the Orinoco delta in Venezuela, and saved enough to buy a house. She started university in New York in her 40s. Stubbornness, resourcefulness and resilience have allowed Nang to surmount life’s scars and tragedies. As her many changes of first and last names suggest, she was constantly reinventing herself. In this vivid portrait, filmmaker Richard Fung gets to know his first cousin at her current home in New Mexico and on the road in Trinidad.

In the fall of 1986, Richard Fung made his first visit to his father's birthplace, a village in southern Guangdong, China. This experimental documentary examines the way children of immigrants relate to the land of their parents, and focuses on the ongoing subjective construction of history and memory. The Way to My Father's Village juxtaposes the son's search for his own historical roots, and his father's avoidance of his cultural heritage.

In The Enigma of Harold Sonny Ladoo Richard Fung draws on a 20-year-old archive of video interviews by Trinidadian filmmaker Christopher Laird, a founder of the pioneering Trinidadian film and television production company, Banyan. Laird spoke with Ladoo’s family, Trinidad intimates, and members of the Canadian literary scene who helped advance Ladoo’s career in Toronto. Filmed in Trinidad and Toronto, the film attempts to piece together the puzzle of Ladoo’s complex, often tumultuous life, and his tragic death. Caribbean and Canadian-Caribbean authors Shani Mootoo, Kevin Jared Hosein, Andil Gosine, Ramabai Espinet, and David Chariandy voice Ladoo’s groundbreaking fiction, alongside animated drawings by Trinidadian artist Adam Williams.

In a courageous, straight into the camera, monologue the film maker tells us what it's like to be the school fag. The only one that is out about being gay in a small town high school.

My Mother's Place is an experimental documentary focusing on the artist's mother, a third-generation Chinese-Trinidadian who at 80 still has vivid memories of a history lost or quickly disappearing. She conveys these with a storytelling style and a frankness that is distinctly West Indian. A tape about memory, oral history, and autobiography, My Mother's Place interweaves interviews, personal narrative, home movies, and verité footage of the Caribbean to explore the formation of race, class, and gender under colonialism.

Home movies and family photographs mixed with drawings and texts tell the story of a family that has lived with disease.

This video focuses on the experiences of four Asian men. Each person is in a different stage of HIV infection and each has significant experiences with various issues surrounding the disease. The interviews focus on the personal, the therapeutic, the medical and the political with HIV as a constant reference throughout.