‘Lingua Franca’: LGBTQ+ Migration and Precarious Life (Migration and Social Justice Film Series)
The Melbourne Social Equity Institute is pleased to be partnering with Screening Ideas to present the Migration and Social Justice film series.
Join us on Tuesday 17 May for a screening and discussion of Lingua Franca.
The screening will be followed by a conversation with Hasib Hourani.
Olivia, a transgender Filipino woman, works as a caregiver in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach for Olga, an elderly woman suffering from dementia. As an undocumented migrant, she lives in fear that either her visa status or gender identity will be discovered by those around her, threatening to destroy the precarious life she has made for herself in the United States. When Olga’s hotheaded grandson Alex returns to Brooklyn to live with his grandmother, Olivia’s plans are thrown into disarray and she is forced to renegotiate intimacy with this new – and dangerous – force in her life. Starring, written and directed by Isabel Sandoval (the first openly transgender woman to premiere a film at the Venice Film Festival), Lingua Franca is a powerful dramatic reflection of the intersecting struggles of migration, gender and LGBTQ life in the United States.
Registration is free but capacity is strictly limited, so book now to avoid disappointment.
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Hasib Hourani is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer, editor and arts worker.
Born stateless in Bahrain, Hasib grew up between Naarm and the Gulf, returning to so-called Australia in 2016. Hasib’s practice disrupts expectations of place, archive, and the relationship between the two. Through writing, he enacts processes of sprawling, fragmenting, and stitching back together.
Hasib is a 2020 recipient of The Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter Scheme and his 2021 essay, when we blink, was shortlisted for The LIMINAL & Pantera Press Nonfiction prize. Hasib is currently working on his debut publication, a book of experimental poetry about suffocation and the occupation of Palestine. In the meantime, you can find Hasib’s work in Meanjin, Overland, Australian Poetry, and Going Down Swinging, among others. Hasib is a Creative Producer at Next Wave, Online Editor at Voiceworks, and Communications Director at Road to Refuge.