Kevin d'Souza

M
Born
1968
in
Pakistan
,
PK
Lives in
Calgary , AB
Canada
,
Alberta CA
Biography

Video maker, activist, writer. Pakistan-born, Calgary-trained d’Souza was a mainstay of Prairie queer arts/culture and anti-racism political scenes in the 1990s before moving to Australia. His video work showed in queer venues from New Delhi to Calgary, where he was instrumental in setting up the first queer video and film festival in 1995. He specialized in compilations of diverse vignettes of, or by, South Asian gay men each bringing different sensibility and styles to issues of identity and sexuality. Key examples were his distance between us (1999), an enigmatic series of emotions and portraits. His best known work Puri (made with his frequent collaborator, Toronto writer/activist/broadcaster Arif Noorani, 1998, 6), sensuously strings together experimental and narrative glimpses of subjective, erotic experiences, ranging from a fantasy of a stern math teacher being ploughed on his own desk by a precocious student, to a memory of furtive teenage Hindi-movie-sharing between best buddies, all under a Bollywood male-male song-and-dance duet.