Fort York
monday, june 16, 2025

I saw the tv glow

With the short films Glow and Inkwo for When the Starving Return

Perhaps the most groundbreaking film released in 2024, I Saw The TV Glow is an essential entry into the coming of age canon and has established filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun as an exciting new voice in trans cinema. The film follows Owen’s (Justice Smith) changing relationship across four decades of his life to The Pink Opaque, a mysterious 1990s young adult TV show introduced to teenage Owen by a fellow social outcast that’s equal parts Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Pee Wee’s Playhouse, and Ghostwriter. The film revels in a lush, glitchy mid-90s YA television aesthetic, playing gleefully with millennial nostalgia to build a complex allegory for how pop culture influences how we understand our identities – particularly for transgender people. However, instead of offering a reassuring, idealistic coming out narrative, Schoenbrun invites her audience to bear witness to the horrific consequences of building a hostile world that forces trans people back into the closet and denies them the right to live their authentic selves. In this too-real nightmare, the road not taken when we were young turns out to have been the only way out. Visually arresting and narratively innovative, I Saw The TV Glow received only the briefest limited theatrical runs in Canada, and we are excited to show this important piece of trans cinema to Toronto audiences in the glow of our big outdoor screen.

Paired with I Saw The TV Glow are two short films that similarly build rich allegories for identity, agency, and interpersonal relationships. Red River Métis filmmaker Amanda Strong’s Inkwo for When the Starving Return follows Dove, a gender-shifting warrior, who uses their Indigenous medicine, or “Inkwo,” to protect their community from a swarm of monsters. Gorgeously realized in stop-motion animation, the film shows how important confidence in one's identity is in fighting back against injustice. In contrast, Nate Wilson’s Glow shares I Saw The TV Glow’s off-beat nostalgia with its own retro-1970s aesthetic, using ghosts, comic books, and old batteries as vivid visual metaphors for navigating traumatic childhood experiences.