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A year after reaching the legal drinking age, and before transitioning to female later on, the Canadian writer and filmmaker Vivek Shraya summoned the courage to enter the Roost, the most popular gay bar in her hometown of Edmonton. But while she found excitement within the Roost’s walls, the sense of community that she’d hoped awaited her was missing – or, at least, it was all much more complicated than she had anticipated. Even in this gay sanctuary, divisions of queerness and race, and in-groups and out-groups, created hierarchies of oppression that left her riddled with self-doubt. But then she went to Toronto, where each group had its own bar, and realised she had overlooked something important about the Roost. Set to pulsing music and neon-inspired animation, Shraya’s short film Reviving the Roost is a paean to a now-shuttered Edmonton institution, in all its sweaty, imperfect glory.
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Food and drink
Local tensions simmer amid a potato salad contest at the Czech-Polish border
14 minutes
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Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
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Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
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Technology and the self
How the magic of photography brought Victorian England closer to the spirit realm
16 minutes
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Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
11 minutes
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Home
An artist endeavours to bring the Moon down to Earth in a ritual of yearning
5 minutes
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Information and communication
An animation built from road signs is a whirlwind study of flash communication
2 minutes
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Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
15 minutes
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War and peace
A century later, can poetry help us make sense of the First World War’s horrors?
9 minutes