BELL MANOR PARK
Thursday, August 13, 2026

the queen of my dreams

With the short films baby fat and Pink Light

Through the lens of Bollywood fantasy, the time-bending, transnational film The Queen of My Dreams tells the story of twenty-something Azra (Amrit Kaur in a Canadian Screen Award-winning lead performance), a queer Pakistani-Canadian Muslim woman. Azra’s coming-of-age narrative is portrayed alongside flashbacks of her mother Mariam’s own young adult story, first in Karachi with her new beau, Azra’s father, then as a recent immigrant to Canada with their young family. Pakistani-Canadian director Fawzia Mirza builds the narrative around an emotional journey to the family’s homeland for Azra’s father’s untimely funeral. Mother and daughter’s reunion in Karachi is the impetus for Azra to discover her mother’s experiences as a young woman undertaking a life-altering journey, while trying to carve out her place in the world. Through third culture storytelling, Mirza draws on her own experiences as a South Asian, queer Muslim woman to give Azra the chance to retrace her mother’s steps, and to see how much more she has in common with her mother than she originally thought.

Feeling stuck in your twenties, haunted by the fear you’ve chosen the wrong path and burdened with familial pressures, is the all-too-common reality suburban Torontonian Kitty is confronted with when her best friend tells her she’s moving away to chase her dreams in Los Angeles. Moving through Kitty’s initial fear of embarking on a new adventure to her giddy snap decision to leave behind what no longer serves her, baby fat, directed by Toronto filmmaker Iris Kim, shows us how sometimes the contemplation of the journey becomes a part of the journey itself.

Memory has the ability to spark a multitude of feelings, jolting us to relive parts of our past lives. Based on transgender director, author, and athlete Harrison Browne’s real life, Pink Light tells the story of a professional hockey player flashing back to his youth, a transitional time when he was waiting on the brink for life to really begin, while simultaneously closing out a very meaningful chapter. The film explores hard-won hindsight and the complicated feelings of lamenting and honouring our past selves while knowing the current moment embodies the person you were always meant to be.