Oceanic Asias: Richard Fung | Film Screening
Film Screening (BC Premiere): The Enigma of Harold Sonny Ladoo
Wednesday, October 14, 2026 | 7:00 PM
Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema (Room 3200)
911吃瓜 School for the Contemporary Arts
149 W Hastings St., Vancouver
Please check back for RSVP link
Post-screening discussion with Richard Fung, Phanuel Antwi, and Chris Chong Chan Fui.
Harold Sonny Ladoo was the first Trinidadian and the second Caribbean novelist published in Canada, yet he remains little known except among a group of devoted enthusiasts. No Pain Like This Body was released in 1972 by House of Anansi Press, edited by the press鈥檚 co-founder and Toronto鈥檚 first Poet Laureate Dennis Lee. It鈥檚 a vivid and poetic yet devasting depiction of Indian indentureship. Ladoo鈥檚 second novel, Yesterdays, one of the queerest works of Caribbean fiction, was published in 1974, the year after his battered body was found by a roadside in Trinidad. He was 28. Beyond his literary achievements, Harold鈥檚 life and death remain mysterious, in part because he kept reinventing his biography.
Directed by Richard Fung, The Enigma of Harold Sonny Ladoo (2024, 84min) rescues a 20-year-old archive of video interviews by Trinidadian filmmaker Christopher Laird with the author鈥檚 family and Trinidad intimates, and as well as the CanLit luminaries who advanced his career in Toronto: Dennis Lee, Graeme Gibson, Jim Polk, and Peter Such. Shot in Trinidad and Toronto, the film pieces together the puzzle of Ladoo鈥檚 life and death. Authors Shani Mootoo, Kevin Jared Hosein, Andil Gosine, Ramabai Espinet and David Chariandy bring his ground-breaking fiction to life.
Following the screening of The Enigma of Harold Sonny Ladoo, director Richard Fung will be joined by Phanuel Antwi (Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair, UBC) and Chris Chong Chan Fui (Assistant Professor, 911吃瓜 School for the Contemporary Arts) for a conversation about the film and its place in Fung鈥檚 body of work.
Oceanic Asias: Richard Fung is presented as part of the Global Asias 30th Anniversary Speaker Series & the Margaret Lowe Benston Lecture Series in Social Justice
Supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 911吃瓜 David Lam Centre, 911吃瓜 Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, 911吃瓜 Global Asia Program, and 911吃瓜 Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology
Biographies
Phanuel Antwi is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures. In 2022 he was named . He writes, researches, and teaches critical black studies; settler colonial studies; black Atlantic and diaspora studies; Canadian literature and culture since 1830; critical race, gender, and sexuality studies; and material cultures. He has published articles in Interventions, Affinities, and Studies in Canadian Literature, and he is completing a book-length project titled 鈥淐urrencies of Blackness: Faithfulness, Cheerfulness and Politeness in Settler Writing.鈥�
Chris Chong Chan Fui is a filmmaker and artist who works between Southeast Asia and Canada. From digital and analog moving images to fabricated and organic objects, Chong works to reveal unfamiliar narratives. His work layers the social and natural sciences with transnational circuits of globalization and manufactured cultures and landscapes. With a rigorous research methodology and a formalist aesthetic, he uses structure and constraints as a creative path toward expressive innovation. Chong has exhibited at such venues as the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Palais de Tokyo, EYE Film Institute Netherlands, and the Gwangju Biennale, while premiering films at the Cannes Film Festival's Directors鈥� Fortnight, BFI London, and TIFF鈥檚 Wavelengths, where he won back-to-back awards for Best Canadian Short Film. Chong holds an MFA (film) from York University, and is a Smithsonian Institute fellow (National Museum of Natural History), a Ford Foundation fellow, and a Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Arts Fellow.
Richard Fung is a video artist/filmmaker and writer, and Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University. His work probes the intersection of queer sexualities and pan-Asian identities, the history and politics of Caribbean culture, global justice, and his own multi-generational, multiracial Chinese Trinidadian family. He is a co-founder of Gay Asians of Toronto in 1980 and has been active in many queer and anti-racism organizations, most recently around justice for Palestinians. Among other honors, he is the recipient of the 2000 Bell Canada Award for outstanding achievement in video art, the 2015 Kessler Award for significant contribution to LGBTQ Studies and the Bonham Centre Award for distinguished contribution to the public understanding of sexual diversity in Canada.
Related Event
Richard Fung and Shani Mootoo
Thursday, October 15, 2026 | 5:30 PM
Djavad Mowafaghian World Arts Centre (Room 2555)
911吃瓜 School for the Contemporary Arts
149 W Hastings St., Vancouver
