Today's show features interviews with two National Film Board documentaries recently screened at Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival. Both explore masculinity but are set in different parts of the country: director Sinakson Trevor Soloway's film Siksikakowan: The Blackfoot Man is set on a First Nations reserve in Alberta, while director Serville Poblete's short documentary King's Court, featuring subjects Marley Zion, Raymond Lawrence, and Stephen ‘SK’ Danso, is set on the basketball courts of St. James Town in Toronto.

Music: Ndidi O 'Inside looking out'

Laurie Evan Fraser, artistic director of the Upper Canada Choristers, and singer/poet Jacinto Salcedo, coordinator of Cantemos, join me to discuss their upcoming concert Venezuela Viva, celebrating Venezuelan choral music with African, Spanish, Caribbean, and Indigenous influences. Special guests include composer César Alejandro Carrillo, poet Laura Morales Balza, and La Petite Musicale of Toronto. The concert is on Friday, May 16, 2025, at 7:30 p.m. at Grace Church on-the-Hill, 300 Lonsdale Road, Toronto, with a choral workshop on May 14. For more info: www.uppercanadachoristers.org

Frequent collaborator Heidy M joins me to discuss Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival. Heidy is an arts and culture writer and creator of hyemysings.ca. She is also a programmer for the the genre festival Blood in the Snow and. Rotten Tomato approved movie critic.

Sarah Kambe Holland is the writer and director of a clever coming-of-age teen comedy called Egghead and Twinkie. In the film, Twinkie—freshly out of the closet—talks her best friend, Egghead, into stealing his parents’ car. The two then travel 500 miles to meet the DJ-ing woman who’s been sliding into Twinkie’s DMs. Needless to say, things happen along the way. Available on Demand April 29 (U.S. & Canada)

Then 'Angel's in the Dark, an audio drama from the Wireless Theatre Company Limited. This Scrooge meets The Twilight Zone drama is about a boss from hell who may or may not learn for his past actions.

Music: 'Aerobics in space' by MayleeTodd

Award-winning director, Nik Sexton and Canadian Screen Award nominee, Sean Dalton (former drummer for The Trews) and I have a good chat about the film SKEET.

SYNOPSIS: Fresh out of prison, Billy Skinner (Sean Dalton) returns to his transformed low-income neighborhood, now populated by Syrian refugees. Struggling to overcome his dark past, Billy forges an unexpected bond with Mo (Jay Abdo), a compassionate Syrian immigrant determined to build a better life for his family.

Playing for one night only April 16th at the Royal in Toronto. Get your tickets at https://theroyal.to Click on EVENTS. Time: 7:00 p.m. (Doors open at 6:00 p.m.) Location: The Royal Theatre - 608 College St, Toronto, ON Age requirement: +16 TICKETS: $15

NEXT STOPS: Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver

https://skeetfilm.com/

Catherine Bourgeois, Artistic and Executive Director of Montreal's Joe Jack et John Productions joins me to talk about the company and Cispersonnages en quête d'auteurice/Cis-characters in Search of an Author which will run April 24 to 27, 2025 at Theatre Passe Muraille, 16 Ryerson Ave, Toronto

SYNOPSIS: Five neurodivergent performers gather in a rehearsal studio to kick off a new creative process. But when they realize they can’t put on the unicorn show they originally envisioned—because, well, they’re not unicorns—they each start pitching ideas to break through the creative block.

http://www.passemuraille.ca/

The show is the first collaboration between Théâtre français de Toronto and Théâtre Passe Muraille. All performances are in French with ENGLISH surtitles.

Music: Poso Oyo by Naxx Bitota

My featured guest today is the dynamic Alphonso King Jr. Alphonso is an HIV/AIDS activist and public speaker, aka drag queen Jade Elektra and aka DJ Relentless.

Alphonso joined me to talk about Top Star Live 2025, his weekly Wednesday evening talent show, but our conversation veered off into other areas of his fascinating life and some interesting and personal LGBT+ history facts came to light.

Later on in the show you'll hear a bit more from Alphonso from his appearance on Season 3 of Drag Heels.

Music: Live performances by Ackeria Smith (Top Star Live 2024 winner) of "Saving all my Live for you" and Jade Elektra sings "What a difference a day makes" at the historic El Mocambo during the POZ-TO 2025 Awards.

Award-winning writer and director, Karen Chapman shares her journey of making 'Village Keeper', a family drama set in the Lawrence Heights community in Toronto, and why it was important for her to add a sense of hope to the film. 'Village Keeper' focuses on a grieving widow struggling to protect her kids from neighbourhood violence while dealing with her own buried trauma. The film opens in Cineplex Cinemas March 28, 2025.

Kevin Matthew Wong is a Hakka Chinese-Canadian theatre creator, dramaturg, facilitator, video artist, and producer. The co-founder of Broadleaf Creative joins me to talk about the world premiere of his work 'Benevolence,' running April 8 - May 4, 2025 at the Tarragon Theatre

Music: 'Home' by Miss Neshama

I'm reunited with two documentary filmmakers today. I first interviewed director Laurie Townshend (A Mother Apart) along with her subject Staceyann Chin last year at Hot Docs. In this chat, the spotlight is on Laurie's journey as a filmmaker, the travels of her documentary, and the role of mothering.

A Mother Apart follows the journey of award-winning poet and performance artist Staceyann Chin as she looks for answers about her mother who abandoned her as a child. The film captures the healing power of radical motherhood, as we watch Staceyann confront the painful abandonment of her childhood while trying to mother differently, with her young and outspoken daughter, Zuri. Staceyann Chin dares to redefine motherhood for herself as her young daughter Zuri finds her own voice on a journey that takes them from Canada to Europe, to the US then Jamaica.

The film will stream on CBC Gem and the NFB's free app.

After six years, Megan Wennberg and I catch up about her latest documentary 'Dances with Cranes' for CBC's The Nature of Things. I last spoke with Megan in 2019 about her doc 'Drag Kids.'

Award-winning filmmaker Megan Wennberg (Unsyncable, 2023) captures the remarkable recovery of Whooping Cranes from the brink of extinction in Dances with Cranes. Joined by renowned conservation scientist and fellow Nova Scotian George Archibald, Wennberg follows this incredible story from the early days, when Archibald spent years ‘dancing’ with a female whooping crane named Tex, in hopes he could get her to reproduce. Dances with Cranes premieres on CBC’s The Nature of Things, Thursday, March 13 at 9 pm (9:30 NT) on CBC and CBC Gem.

I chat with playwright and actor Rosamund Small about her latest work, Performance Review, presented by Outside the March Theatre Company. The solo performance explores some of the difficulties women experience in the world of work.

Then, I'll have a focus on Beah Richards in her own words. If the name sounds familiar, she is best known to the general public for her Oscar-nominated role as Sidney Poitier's mother in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Besides being a movie actress, Beah Richards was a TV and stage actress and a writer. She is the subject of the award-winning documentary Beah: A Black Woman Speaks by Lisagay Harden. Today, you'll hear a clip from the film and a performance by Beah of her work A Black Woman Speaks of White Womanhood, of White Supremacy, of Peace.

The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the AFI Film Festival and A Peabody. You can find out more about LisaGay at https://www.lisagayhamilton.com

Music:

Amai Kuda and Y Josephine 'Freedom'

Lorraine Klaassen 'Jolinkomo'