gyal (2022)

Directors: Vuk Dragojevic, Premika Leo, & Ryan Persadie
Writer: Ryan Persadie
Stars: Premika Leo, Ryan Persadie, & Anjulie Shiwraj

The short film “Gyal” by Ryan Persadie follows the interventions made in the digital photographs produced under the title of “Tanty Feminisms” with Mashal Khan through his annual “Coolieween” series. The film traces the movements of transnational racialized, sexual, and gendered violence that live within the archive of Afro-Asian encounters in the Caribbean, particularly Indo-Caribbean femininity and sexuality. Centering nameless and fragmented acts of misogyny that move through such spectral flows from the Caribbean plantation to the diaspora in Canada and the US, Persadie and his collaborators give movement, embodiment, and agentive force to these neo-colonial histories of gendered violence and their afterlives in our everyday experiences as descendants of indenture in the Caribbean diaspora.

The aunty (tanty) spirits you will follow in the film are nameless and move through fracture and obscurity, forcing us to contend with how the often non-linear and messy acts of violence that emerge from the plantation force us to stare in the face of its power in geographies we now call Toronto, Brampton, Queens, and Scarborough, among many others.

The film was made possible by essential collaborations with long-standing Caribbean and other QTBIPOC organizers, feminist agitators, and thinkers whose activism, artistry, and cultural production curated an important genealogy this film thinks and works through, including Caribbean Equality Project, University of Toronto Historical Studies Department, The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, Lotus Toronto, Gay Men’s Sexual Health Alliance, and Centre for Caribbean Studies.

To learn more about the Caribbean Equality Project & for regular updates on our work, connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube at @CaribbeanEqualityProject, and Twitter at @CaribEquality.