Three films due to be shown at a gay film festival were confiscated by Canada border guards last week.
High-quality cinema prints of the British lesbian feature I Can’t Think Straight, British TV drama Clapham Junction and Swedish film Patrik 1.5 were seized. According to a report on Canadian queer news site Xtra.ca, officials intend to hold the films until they have time to watch them each all the way through.
I Can’t Think Straight, by director Sharmin Sharif, is a mainstream rom-com that received a 12A certificate in the UK. Patrik 1.5 concerns a gay couple who adopt a teenager and was rated PG. Clapham Junction, shown on C4 in 2007, was part of a season that highlighted changes in lesbian and gay life in Britain since decriminalization in 1967.
The three movies are all distributed by gay American entertainment company Here! The Canada Border Services Agency has not given a reason for holding the films but it has a record of seizing lesbian and gay material.
"It seems biased at some times, and at other times random," festival programming director Jason St-Laurent told Xtra.ca. "But to me, this time, it is not a random event."
In 2000, Vancouver bookstore Little Sisters took the CBSA (formerly Canada Customs) to the Supreme Court, which acknowledged that lesbian and gay themed books and magazines were routinely delayed because of their content. They ordered officials to stop.
Canadian lesbians and gay men had hoped that this ruling would end two decades of harassment by the government agency but the situation improved only somewhat and in 2002 the CBSA impounded copies of Cherry, a lesbian erotic novel by British writer Charlotte Cooper, published under Red Hot DIVA imprint.
Organisers of the annual Inside Out film festival have been forced to find substitute prints to show expectant audiences or risk losing hundreds of thousands in revenue per screening.