This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Charley Tamagno for the McGill Daily (MD): What’s the day-to-day of an RLF like?

Ksenia Boyer Voutova (KBV):

Right now it’s a lot more intense because we’re doing Welcome Week. Being an RLF feels more like an extracurricular than a job. Because it’s part-time, I still have a busy academic and social life. When I’m working, there’s a lot of different tasks – we either have events or office hours. For the events, we plan them and have to attend them. The office hours can happen from 9 to 5 every weekday. During office hours, you work on project planning and advertisements – whether that be making a poster on Canva, making a reel, [or] replying to student questions on Instagram. We have a lot of meetings, whether that be with our manager or with our teams. There we discuss feedback and brainstorm our next events.

MD: How do the first two weeks differ from the rest of the year?

Olivia Morawetz (OM): You work pretty much full time. Usually, throughout the rest of the year, you work six to 10 hours, and then in the first few weeks you’re working 40 hours. So it’s a full-time gig.

MD: Do you feel like these first two weeks are more rewarding than the rest of the year because you’re really meeting the students? Can you see yourself having an impact?

OM: The first few weeks are definitely the best in terms of visibility. We do hall meetings, where we talk to every single student in the building, and that’s really motivating in terms of making sure that they know who we are and know that we exist. During the rest of the year, attendance really goes down, and it makes you feel like nobody wants to attend events anymore. At the beginning of the year, people are really, really motivated to go to events and meet people and see us and find out who we are.

KBV: I would say there’s still some events in the middle of the year that feel more rewarding than others, especially big ones where you go out of the residence or on trips. You feel more connected to the community.

MD: What kinds of questions are people asking?

OM: Mostly about logistics, either the rules of residence or the events themselves.

KBV: Sometimes they can ask us questions unrelated to residence life, just [because] we’re upper year students at McGill.

OM: I wish more students knew that RLFs are a resource of upper year students who can answer questions about registering for classes or homework or certain subjects. Last year in Upper Residence we did study hall events that were specifically for studying. We would post “I’m going to be at the study hall today, and I’m studying biology,” so that students who study biology can come and ask that person for help.

MD: What was your experience with Floor Fellows in place of RLFs? Do you think there really is a tangible difference between the two?

Note: Before the 2023-2024 school year, Floor Fellows were upper-year students who lived with residents year-round in residences, working more hours than RLFs in addition to being a 24/7 support system. McGill terminated the Floor Fellow program ahead of the 2024-2025 school year.

OM: It’s not just not living in residence — the job changed a considerable amount. There were some union restrictions the first year [after the switch] that made it so that we weren’t allowed to do any job that the Floor Fellows did. We weren’t allowed to put door decorations up because that was something the Floor Fellows did. [Now] it feels a lot more interactive. We have a number of required monthly events. My Floor Fellow didn’t do any events, so I never saw him after the initial meeting at the beginning of the semester. It was very hands-off. The only people that were running consistent events were the council, which I was on. RLFs are definitely more connected and
interacting with the resident community than the Floor Fellows were.

MD: Do you feel like it’s hard to odd template

actually make a connection with the community?

OM: It depends on the person. Yes, because there are specific residents or groups of residents that don’t interact with us at all, and that’s fine. But there are definitely people who I’ve found, after a few years of doing this, who will come to as many events as they can because they just like having free events that they can attend.

MD: How do you pitch events to first years, and is it important for them to attend those events?

OM: I feel like something we’ve been trying to do more recently is asking first years what things they want to see. I think asking students what events they want to see is important, and a lot of them don’t realize that they can message us and be like, “Hey, I want to do a masquerade ball,” and we’ll be like, “Okay, we’ll try and do that.”

Feedback is a really important part of the job. Even when they designed the project planning template, feedback was built into it. You have to write down feedback after every single event. They started doing the symposium last year, which is a place where all the RLFs go to present their most successful and least successful events of the year, and provide feedback on how those went. Then we could take events from other RLFs.

MD: How do you get inspiration for different events?

KBV: A lot of the time, it’s just things we want to do. We all have different hobbies, so Olivia wants to do something and then I want to do something and then we end up having two different events.

OM: Or in previous years we’ve had really good cultural diversity [on the RLF team]. We had specific cultural events because we had people on the team that were part of those communities and were able to let us know that these things were happening.

MD: Do you have a favorite memory or a favorite event?

OM: Well, we did a formal last year, which was our biggest event, and it had a really good turnout in November, which is really rare for our late events. Usually by the end of the first semester, attendance starts to dwindle a little bit because people have made their own friends or it’s exam season and they don’t want to go to things. We had a bar where we had a menu of mocktails that we made [and] we ordered 50 pounds of sushi. It was insane. I was like a waiter running around with sushi. We had a dance floor. We hired a DJ who was a student in Upper. Some guy showed up with a saxophone at one point and was playing that on the dance floor. People were attending it because of the event. Obviously, with that many moving parts, things are bound to go wrong. But the things that went right outweighed the things that went wrong by a million times, and it was a really, really successful event.

KBV: I loved going to the PWHL [Professional Women’s Hockey League] game. It was really fun because it was just different. For a lot of students, it was their first time seeing a hockey game. That was my first time seeing a hockey game. What’s good about these events is that students are able to try out new things.

MD: Is there anything else you would like to add?

OM: I love my job. I love my team.

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The book has an interesting concept, as it addresses the harsh reality of living with a terminal illness. Noah is diagnosed with Huntington’s disease as a young adult, and his diagnosis catalyzes much of the conflict in the novel as it causes him to push AJ away. While I appreciated the author’s attempt at portraying life with a terminal illness, I felt as though it was only employed superficially as a roadblock to the protagonists’ romance instead of as something essential to Noah’s character.

Rather than portray the difficulties of navigating a relationship while dealing with a terminal illness, the book uses Noah’s diagnosis to pit the protagonists against each other as they disagree about what his medical course of action should be. Noah’s uncertain future is a point of contention between him and AJ for almost the entire novel. While that conflict is understandable and realistic, it never truly gets resolved until the end of the story. The book details their on-again, off-again romance fueled by their opposing beliefs on Noah’s future. However, the story would have been much more compelling had the two protagonists navigated the conflict together, rather than let it tear them apart for thirteen years. After a while, their arguments became repetitive, causing me to lose interest in their relationship. It also felt as though neither of them grew emotionally over the course of the story, and instead remained trapped in the same mindsets they had when they first met. This lack of character and relational development left so much unfulfilled potential for mutual growth and understanding of one another. Hence, the story as a whole fell flat for me.

Moreover, despite AJ and Noah’s bond surviving thirteen years of uncertainty, their situation is not one that should be romanticized. They meet when AJ is in high school, do some improv together, and kiss once before Noah leaves town. AJ is then hung up on him for the rest of the novel—even when she is engaged to another man, and would rather watch Noah, who has become a famous actor, attend the Oscars on television than plan her wedding with her fiancé.

Second chance romances are nothing new, present in beloved romance films such as The Notebook and used to show an unbreakable love between two characters. However, this novel presents AJ and Noah’s bond as something that AJ cannot seem to escape from, even after a decade. While some may find that romantic, I certainly didn’t, and I spent most of the book hoping that AJ would finally get over Noah and move on with her life. Their relationship seemed to hold AJ hostage emotionally, never truly benefiting either character until the end of the novel.

While the romance in itself is undesirable, the book’s main problem is its writing. The first section of the novel follows AJ in the third person during the summer before her last year of high school. The writing, while meant to reflect the mind of a teenager, is at times downright cringeworthy. When AJ first encounters Noah at her job at a video rental store, she describes him as being “so big, he made the DVD case look like baseball cards” (page 12) — an unrealistic and frankly ridiculous line, which is a perfect way to summarize the writing in this novel. Noah can be stripped down to a tall, brooding type while AJ is the quirky loner who pines after him. These tropes have been overdone for decades, so to see them in such a new work — especially one that has received numerous good reviews — is strange and worrisome.

Not only did the juvenile, shallow writing provide an unpleasant reading experience, but it demonstrated the amount of effort that the author put into the development of the protagonists’ bond. On page 33, AJ describes Noah’s eyes as “not ugly” when they change colour in the sun. The lack of effort put into this line irritated me so much that I had to close the book and take a deep breath. Though cliché, this line could have depicted the intimate act of a character observing the small details about a loved one that most people might not notice. However, in this case, the author does not even bother to choose a single compelling adjective to end the sentence with, instead providing us with a useless statement that lacks substance and meaning.

There was potential for Brodie to create a powerful story about navigating romantic relationships in the face of terminal illnesses and the hardships that come along with them. As much as I wanted to love this book, I was disappointed multiple times: first by the poor writing style and then by the weak narrative. Rather than depicting how love can conquer all, this novel showed how no story can conquer a mediocre composition.

The post Into the Editing Room appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Gen Z social media culture has blurred the distinction between basic and niche interests by creating a sort of niche-flation. As certain topics grow in popularity online, and more fans of lesser known topics find each other, the standard of what truly counts as a niche interest keeps rising. Geese, yesterday’s alternative band, can become tomorrow’s mainstream trend overnight. As a result, the niche connoisseurs within this fandom must turn on each other to fight for the spot of the “Number One Fan”, or risk joining the rest of the flock of basic, trend-hopping followers.

Although the ‘Niche Connoisseur’ could covet any band, book, or object, they are easy to spot: whether their subject of choice is the highest grossing band of all time, or has 200 monthly Spotify monthly listeners, they will make sure you know they have a deeper connection to said subject than anyone else. They have two ways of achieving this.

In the first case, when the subject is already popular, the ‘Niche Connoisseur’ turns a widely shared opinion about their interests into a unique statement about their own individuality, one that screams “I like this because I am special.” To do so, they delve into the nooks and crannies of the fandom lore. While this involves more mental gymnastics, it can also be more rewarding because it provides the ‘Niche Connoisseur’ with many, many opportunities to show that while others jumped on the bandwagon, they were the ones who drove it.

For example, I once met a ‘Niche Connoisseur’ who insisted I wasn’t a “real fan” of The Beatles because I didn’t truly know The Beatles discography. Apparently listening to only one album, or a few songs, wasn’t a strong enough expression of my dedication to the band. They argued that if someone really liked The Beatles, they would listen to all of their tracks and see that “Number Nine” is the most sonically impressive Beatles song. Further, they continued, the backstory to each song is incredibly important to actually understanding the music, so a real fan would listen to the tapes of the band recording the songs, then read the footnotes cited on each member’s Wikipedia page.

So, those 36 million people who listen to the Beatles each year may think they like the band, but they don’t truly understand the music because they don’t get the band. After all, can you really appreciate a song like “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” if you don’t know why Paul McCartney isn’t wearing shoes on the Abbey Road album cover?

In the second case of the ‘Niche Connoisseur’, where the subject of enjoyment is more obscure, conflict is (paradoxically) much more likely to arise, especially in online spaces. An alternative band may be known to very few, leading each fan to believe that they are the band’s only true follower. The only one who knew them before they got big — that is, until they find other fans online, and now must prove they were the original fan that posers only seek to imitate.

Let’s imagine an indie band called Hard-Kick that has one popular song that blew up on TikTok. Hundreds of thousands can sing the chorus, but only two people have listened to and enjoyed the full album from which it is from. Both criticize their friends for praising Hard-Kick without meeting the ‘Niche Connoisseur’s standards for enjoying the song. Online, they comment under videos of strangers dancing or lip-syncing to the trending chorus, saying that they’re too “basic” to understand the deeper meaning behind the song, and don’t understand the culture behind it. One day, Fan #1 sees Fan #2’s comment reading, “Real ones know Hard-Kick from the song ‘I Kick Real Hard’ rather than the catchy single ‘Kick Quick’.” Instead of agreeing with Fan #2 that more people should enjoy “I Kick Real Hard”, Fan #1 retorts that, actually, real fans would understand that Hard-Kick’s best song (which is somehow also their least known) is “Kick, Hit, Kick.”

A thread then emerges of both fans trying to out-niche the other over their shared love of Hard-Kick, instead of geeking out about it together. They can’t appreciate their mutual interest, because if others like Hard-Kick just as much as they do, then they are just like everyone else. People who could have been friends are turned to enemies by their own insecurity of being seen as basic. As seen in Marvel comic book and movie fans, who respectively claim that a real fan would read all the comics or watch all the movies.

This niche-on-niche violence happens everyday online, with no peace in sight so long as the standards of what counts as niche is gatekept by a wall of over-possessive fans, who would, to protect their egos, rather see their chosen artist poor and unknown than mainstream and, God forbid, basic. Similarly, for the same reasons, they would rather listen to music alone than play it aloud to an equally enraptured friend.

The ‘Niche Connoisseur’ is annoying to meet in person, discouraging to meet online, and above all else harmful to their artist of choice. In the first case, a person puts down the interest of others in order to further their own ego. The second, they turn what could be an engaging online forum to celebrate an artist into a battleground of “If you liked Y, you would know X.” Both create a negative connotation between the subject and a possible fan. Until the terms “basic” and “niche” are deemed neutral, rather than inferior and superior, ‘Niche Connoisseurs’ will continue to deter people not only from getting to know them personally, but from getting to know their obsession of choice.

The post Please Stop Listening to My Favourite Band appeared first on The McGill Daily.

We, Gen Z, are the generation who are constantly told by Millennials and Gen X that we have killed the dance floor, that we drink less and date less than any generation before, that AI will be taking over our pointless degrees, and that climate change will kill us before we can have children or own a home. When we do go clubbing to seize the supposedly fleeting days we have left, we open social media the next morning only to be asphyxiated by hundreds of reels with people advising us to go to the gym, hit our protein goals, stay home, and make zero-calorie-low-fat-oat-milk-chia-seed slop for a sweet treat (as you’re watching these reels, you’ve done none of these things). The irony and the pressure are discouraging.

Wellness Anarchism is a term coined by British award winning brand strategist and entrepreneur Tom Garland in 2025. Garland is an expert with over twelve years of experience in consumer research and trend forecasting, and founder of the brand consultancy edition+partners. Garland’s Wellness Anarchist is someone who strives to lead a balanced yet uninhibited lifestyle, ultimately rejecting the overbearing health and life optimization peddled by the mainstream wellness industry. For example, the Wellness Anarchist could be found at their run club, but always finishing it off with celebratory drinks. A term that began as a consumer archetype has evolved into less of an identity and more a
wide range of daily habits. These habits are particularly enacted by Gen Z for a sense of control over the futurity that has been taken from us. Wellness culture, with its traditionally strict, all-or-nothing framework, has thus been met with Wellness Anarchist resistance. The practices Gen Z appear to be using to combat it include, but are not limited to a notable surge in: smoking; short-term and noncommittal relationships; and making frequent, smaller purchases rather than large savings and investments.

Of course, there is something to be said about seeking instant gratification and rebellion, and their historical connection to youth. Disobeying parents’ wishes, sneaking out, or impulsively changing one’s appearance, to name a few examples, have long been staples of youth culture and the tendency to prioritize our immediate desires over future consequences. Wellness Anarchism, even before the term was coined, has always been a means for young adults to manage the stresses and anxieties of being in such a transitional stage of life. But in the year of 2026, we all have much more on our plates than we ever bargained for — and online discourse of Gen Z’s doom, combined with wellness culture being pushed down our throats, certainly isn’t lightening the load.

Two years ago, Substacker Sarah Noack published her article, “Dump your matcha and have a cigarette, bitch,” that now has over 22.5K likes and 4.5K reposts. Despite the conviction in her title, Noack highlights how the Ikarians, inhabitants of one of the world’s Blue Zones (regions with high population longevity), have never engaged in what we know to be wellness practices. Rather, they simply walk or swim instead of going for spin class, they also nap, eat locally produced food, and most importantly, enjoy substances like alcohol and tobacco for pleasure rather than as vices. A portion of Gen Z is arguably no longer just following in the footsteps of our predecessors’ reckless youth but also using these habits as what Noack describes as a “necessary escape.”

The latest Canadian Tobacco and Nicotine Survey from 2022 shows young adult smokers (20-24) decreased from 10 per cent in 2021 to 8 per cent in 2022, and smoking reached generational lows worldwide. However, we do not yet have data from the past year, when smoking cigarettes made a dramatic resurgence online. Whether it’s Kylie Jenner lighting one on the cover of Vanity Fair or countless images of Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams with cigarettes in hand, we’ve all watched the revival of the cigarette as a symbol of rebellion, an aesthetic, and, for some, an escape from everyday pressures.

Earlier this year, the CBC released an article titled “Smoking is making a pop culture comeback (even if the risks haven’t changed),” which fully explains how smoking has made a large return to mainstream media. In the article, Jared Oviatt, who runs the popular Instagram account @cigfluencers, said he saw the pop culture resurgence of smoking as separate from other mundane daily habits. However, through his social media presence, Oviatt has expended time, effort, and energy towards the aestheticization of the cigarette. It works directly in his favour to argue that the pop culture spotlight on smoking has no real effects, hence avoiding culpability for perpetuating smoking as an aesthetic, while maintaining his own habit guilt-free. Oviatt’s prediction of the ultimate demise of the trend ignores the fact that cigarettes are an addictive chemical substance, not something as innocent as a polka dot top from Brandy Melville. While we do not yet have the data to assess the real-world impacts of the cigarette’s cultural renaissance, celebrities can influence what we find cool, what we purchase, and where we go. Hence, it would be naive to say their actions are totally distinct from our own and have no impact on our individual choices.

Where I can agree with Oviatt is his theory on why young people smoke. Oviatt acknowledges that broader economic and social pressures are at play: “The anxiety over climate change, general burnout … it’s all part of it.” There has always been a traditional appeal to doing something taboo, recreationally sharing substances to foster a sense of community, and emulating your idols. Still, smoking has been on the decline for decades now. What’s different today is the pressure our generation faces, and a resulting inability to conceptualize our futures.

What’s more, Gen Z is notably dating less than previous generations, notoriously choosing more low-commitment, non-exclusive romantic relationships. The Atlantic declared that we are in a “Great Romance Slump”, with declining marriage rates and exclusive relationships, with 42 per cent of single adults under 40 in 2019 having never been in a committed relationship. Moreover, Gen Z has been spending more on everyday, smaller purchases to make their day-to-day lives easier, rather than saving for large future purchases. I would argue that the loss of our capacities to imagine a successful and secure future, and our consequent sense of general despair, contribute to a lack of commitment present both in romantic relationships and in the fruits of our spending power. Of course, low-commitment, non-exclusive romantic relationships have always existed. Gen Z has only legitimized this dynamic by giving it a name: the “situationship.” Even then, it appears to be more present than ever before.

Alongside a discernible revival of the cigarette, a decline in committed exclusive romantic relationships and an increase in short-term spending, it seems paradoxical that sobriety is on the rise. A World Finance Report found that Gen Z averages around 20 per cent less alcohol consumption than millennials. There are many possible reasons for this: a better understanding of the dangers of drinking, inflated prices, wellness culture, to name a few. If all of this data is factual, then why do we throw caution to the wind with our wallets, lungs, and love lives, but not alcohol?

No matter how one looks at the data, Gen Z appears to take the hit. We are smoking more, meaning we suck; dating less, meaning we suck; and drinking less. Though supposedly healthier, the narrative remains that we are less fun, and thus suck. In contention, I would argue that it is not Gen Z who is responsible for the death of the dance floor, but our predecessors. With their wellness culture and talk of doom and despair, they have made us the generation of Wellness Anarchism: the same generation that has brought back smoking and rejects commitment more than ever, who will always buy the overpriced latte.

I don’t speak from a place of judgement, but of deep understanding. I am proud to be a Gen Z, so it is hard to be unbiased. But I believe our actions, individual and collective, are valid responses to the state of global affairs, to the overbearing influencers on our phones, and to the way we have been treated by older generations, which has altered our perception of what the future holds and its meaning.

However, as much as these small patterns can bring great relief, we are far from as anarchistic as we may believe. Even if we are using these habits as fleeting escapes from the precarity we face, they are still merely attempts to cope; not, as we saw with Noack’s article, a sign of genuine, carefree living. There is power in Wellness Anarchism, but we are engaging in it out of necessity, not real interest. The $10 matchas are not just simple pleasures, but pinpricks of light amidst a seemingly dreary present and future.

Documentary photographer and poet Sophia Borzilleri articulated it best in an Instagram post, where she described her smoking habit as a means of reminding herself that life doesn’t always have to be taken so seriously, that she can do things that are objectively bad and be at peace with it. This frame of thought counters the dominant narrative in all our lives, that everything is that serious and that everything won’t be okay.

However, Borzilleri adds nuance to this perspective when she says “For me, when I smoke a cigarette, it’s a moment for me to step outside and breathe and realize nothing is that serious. But I want to be able to do that without the cigarette. I want to be able to realize that I don’t always have to be curated, [planned, perfectly healthy] and whatever in order to be okay. I can live in a balance.”

As we begin a new school year, it’s important to be conscious of our habits, not in pursuit of condemning them as either good or bad, but rather to recognize why we engage in certain patterns. Acts such as smoking or spending provide us with a moment of control in a time when we are told we have so little. However, our generation is entitled to living in the present, not because the future does not exist, but because it is something worth looking forward to.

The post The Death of Futurity appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The evening of June 25 saw Fortner perform a solo show at Gesú Concert Hall, near the end of a packed first day of the Montreal International Jazz Festival. Fortner darted quickly onto the stage, phone in one hand and a paper cup of steaming hot tea in the other, smiling at the crowd. “As per usual, I don’t know what I’m gonna do,” he said, and the audience responded with a nervous chuckle. “Bear with me.” 

Seated at a Kawai grand piano, he began with a crowd favourite, “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing” by Stevie Wonder — an interpretation long-time Fortner fans knew from his 2023 album Solo Game. 

“Don’t You Worry ’Bout A Thing” began with a sparse and fleeting arrangement of the famous verse.  Throughout the tune, different sporadic ideas, bubbling up from the deepest depths and raining down from the highest registers of the piano, began to enter into a clear conversation with the main melody, creating a shimmering veil of harmony. In interviews, Fortner has said that he sees harmony as a “set of simultaneous melodies” — an idea stemming straight from classical counterpoint and Ellingtonian composition. As he broadened his harmonic and rhythmic horizons over the course of the song, it became clear that this was not just a catchphrase: it was a core philosophy of Fortner’s playing. It would be easy to imagine each finger having a mind of its own, constantly in a battle between its own desires and the resolution of the larger harmonic theme. The melody, which is ordinarily relegated to the highest voice of an arrangement, was shifted time and again between hands and across different octaves, much as Ravel or Beethoven would transfer thematic motifs through different sections of a symphony orchestra. All of this was overlaid with a masterful articulation and touch, where different voices would come out of the blue, suddenly taking dynamic precedence at times even over the main melody. While many may think of harmony strictly as a way to embellish melody, the care and attention Fortner gave to every harmonic idea made it clear that he didn’t view things in such a straightforwardly hierarchical way. 

He deconstructed “Don’t Worry ’Bout a Thing” piece by piece, peering at each harmonic and rhythmic idea from a few different angles before returning it to its place to fiddle with a new theme. Throughout this demonstration of mastery, Fortner maintained an air of ease and a playful touch. His tapping foot, a quiet onlooker for most of the tune, gradually became a participating accompanist, matching the instrument’s volume as Fortner entered a dynamic peak before fading again into the background of the simple verse. Fortner ended the tune just as he’d started it: with the simplicity of the Stevie Wonder classic.

Fortner’s trademark harmonic exceptionalism and his favoured use of deconstruction were put on pause for a profoundly simple rendition of Oscar Peterson’s L’Impossible. While interpreted by Peterson in certain instances as a Bossa Nova, Fortner’s performance skewed more towards a genre-ambiguous, sine-like purity. A steady offbeat chordal ostinato sounded for nearly the entire duration of the piece, providing a novel departure from the pianist’s relentless explorative rhythmic and harmonic forays. He kept Peterson’s simple diatonic melody relatively free of ornamentation, allowing the audience space to focus on the sound of the piano, the beauty of the melody, and his precise articulation. The peaceful etude seemed to wind its way through gentle hills and across expansive valleys before ending abruptly to nearly everyone’s surprise. The audience was left almost offended: what happened to the melody?! The steadiness and timelessness? Perhaps that’s just what happens, and it is certainly what Fortner intended. 

In addition to being one of jazz’s most cherished legends, Oscar Peterson grew up in the heart of Montreal, where he is now celebrated as one of the city’s most prolific artistic innovators. Fortner evidently took advantage of the location of this venue to highlight Peterson’s legacy — In addition to L’Impossible, his set included a piece from Peterson’s Canadiana Suite, entitled Place St. Henri in honour of the composer’s childhood neighbourhood in south-west Montreal. 

Place St. Henri showcased Fortner’s expertise and knowledge of the jazz repertoire in fiery fashion. Jumping into the tune from a tense silence, his hands slid rapidly from the polar ranges of the concert grand towards middle C, before converging and floating into the higher register in synchrony. This synchrony proved to be short-lived, however, when Fortner proceeded to enter into the familiar out-in left-hand stride pattern championed by everyone from James P. Johnson and Art Tatum to Oscar Peterson. While stride piano is well regarded at all tempos, Fortner decided to employ it at a virtuosically fast clip while his right hand flew around the upper keys in a blur evoking the song’s composer. The audience was already in awe, but Fortner took it further up a notch, dialing up the tempo and the intensity with unwavering precision. An audible murmur and dispersed laughter could be heard throughout the audience. 

Even as the fiery rampage of the piano reached an immensity in volume that seemed to overtake the man at its keys, there was no question that he alone still held the reins. Fortner, who had been peering at the audience and swaying back and forth throughout the show, was now 100 per cent focused. Hunched over, he kept his eyes glued to his darting hands. Just as the heat reached peak ferocity, Fortner dialed back to his tempo primo — a masterful demonstration of tension and release. Then, before anyone could even get the idea of relaxing, Fortner gave a bold flourish, halting the momentum completely with a bang on a low note and jumped clean out of his seat, bolting off the stage. Almost instantly, the audience erupted in almost disbelieving applause. Fortner walked back onstage moments later to a standing ovation.

Once the audience had collected themselves, a final ballad resonated through the concert hall, contemplative and lush. Fortner rounded out the soft tune before following it with a sweeping final cadenza, paying homage to the dualities that had characterized the whole show: a blend of fast and slow, complexity mirrored against simplicity, order balancing chaos. These are the ingredients with which Fortner works, and from my experience are highlighted especially during his solo performances. 

After all, Fortner is not simply a pianist. He is, first and foremost, an arranger — an expert at organizing and rearranging complex webs of rhythm and harmony to create something with as much scope as an orchestral composition within the 88 keys of his instrument. Every tune he plays is orchestrated with a distinct texture, evocative of a range of feelings. With a back pocket full of arranging techniques to pull from, built up over a lifetime of training and experience, every set Fortner plays is guaranteed to be completely unique. What unites them is his humour, insight, and musicality, which suffuses every piece he plays with his distinctive musical fingerprint. Fortner frequently tours with acclaimed vocalist Cecile McLorin Salvant, and his piano trio with Tyrone Allen and Kayvon Gordon (releasing an album, Leave That In There, in late August). While these groups are all incredible in their own ways as distinguished faces of modern jazz, an opportunity to see one of Fortner’s rare solo shows should not be missed.

The post Review: Sullivan Fortner Solo at Gesú Concert Hall appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Since 1980, Jazz Fest has attracted world-class musicians and music lovers alike with a dazzling week of free shows and musical exploration. In what has become the largest jazz festival in the world, both established legends and rising stars of jazz and adjacent genres take to public outdoor stages in and around Place Des Arts during the 10-day event. Over the years, the festival has hosted a plethora of household names, including Miles Davis, Oscar Peterson–a jazz pianist and hometown hero raised in Little Burgundy, Ray Charles, Dave Brubeck, and Aretha Franklin. This years’ festival highlights some of the brightest global talents in music from veteran Charles Lloyd to Earth, Wind & Fire to Immanuel Wilkins.

In addition, many local Montreal talents are bringing their own homegrown vibrancy to the stages. In this year’s edition of Jazz Fest, many local jazz groups are scheduled to play major sets, showcasing Montreal’s robust jazz culture to festival attendees. Below, I chose to highlight one official McGill ensemble, one McGill student-led group, and one faculty-led group, all of which are performing sets you definitely will not want to miss:

The McGill Jazz Orchestra 1: June 26, 5:00 pm, Rio Tinto Stage (Free)

The McGill Jazz Orchestra 1 is an ensemble made up of talented students from the Schulich School of Music at McGill University. They will play a large outdoor set at Jazz Fest, free of charge. Incidentally, this is not the orchestra’s first major gig. Every year, the Jazz Orchestra plays an array of shows throughout the city at different venues, with members of the orchestra leading bands that perform regularly at jazz clubs across Montreal. 

The ensemble is directed by acclaimed Canadian pianist and composer Marianne Trudel, who has performed extensively with l’Orchestre National de Jazz de Montréal, and with major names such as Chucho Valdés, Kenny Wheeler, and Ingrid Jensen. Trudel also composes an extensive contemporary repertoire for the McGill Jazz Orchestra 1, giving the 18-piece group a unique sound that will undoubtedly capture listeners’ attention.

Professor Trudel told The Daily that audiences at the Jazz Orchestra’s upcoming Jazz Fest set can expect “a broad spectrum of styles, energies, and colours” spanning “really early on in big band music to nowadays.” Trudel highlighted the importance of audience participation and the vibrant festival atmosphere in bringing out the best in performers. “I’ve been presenting concerts with the McGill Jazz Orchestra 1 at the Montreal Jazz Fest for a few years now, and every time, I can see that the students are really motivated to play in the largest jazz festival in the world . . . it gets them in a mindset where they play super well.”

Najib Fenaoui: July 4, 6:00 pm, Le Studio TD (Free)

Najib Fenaoui is a McGill student and vocalist who will lead his ensemble, Najib and the Alter Egos, in a free set taking place at Le Studio TD. Fenaoui has a diverse range of musical influences, from Ella Fitzgerald to Bobby McFerrin, and this versatility is clearly expressed through his witty, darting, lyrical phrasing, bringing unmistakable personality to jazz standards.

Fenaoui was the recipient of this year’s Oliver-Jones Prize, which rewards university-level musicians of visible minorities who show extensive musical promise and talent. The reward was created in honour of local legend Oliver Jones, a pianist who traversed local clubs in his home neighbourhood of Little Burgundy to major international stages and festivals. Fenaoui’s reception of the prize comes with the opportunity to perform at the renowned Jazz Fest. “I’m honoured,” Fenaoui tells The Daily regarding winning the esteemed prize. “It’s like a stamp of approval from people that have been doing this for much longer than I have. It’s nice to be recognized by my mentors.” 

Fenaoui sees his first performance as a bandleader in the Jazz Fest as a means to introduce himself to a new, broader audience. For this reason, he is seeking to represent a wide variety of artistic themes in his set. 

“People should expect to see a lot of variety in both vocals and styles, but all within the jazz idiom. Bossa Nova, Blues, swing, Ballads, some Soul and R&B. People should expect to hear my voice explore all of these different styles in a comfortable way. I feel at home in these styles of music and try to blend all of them the best I can.” 

Camille Thurman with the Darrell Green Quartet: June 27, 7:00 pm, Upstairs Jazz Bar & Grill (Paid)

Camille Thurman and Darrell Green are perfect examples of the excellence of the Schulich School of Music jazz faculty. Together, they lead the Downbeat Award-winning McGill Jazz Conglomerate, an ensemble featuring McGill vocalists. They also teach several classes at McGill and serve as indispensable mentors to students in the program. Both are widely considered first-call members of both the New York and Montreal jazz scenes. The two star musicians lead the award-winning group, Camille Thurman with the Darrell Green Quartet, which tours regularly both within North America and beyond.

Camille Thurman is not a performer you want to miss. Known for her rich and dark tone, blisteringly accurate phrasing on the saxophone, as well as her virtuosic abilities as a vocalist, Thurman has built a rich career for herself in the jazz scene. She has played extensively with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis and was a featured soloist in the ensemble’s 2021 tribute to John Coltrane’s magnum opus, A Love Supreme. She has also performed alongside numerous greats, including George Coleman, Chaka Khan, and Erykah Badu.

Darrell Green is a dynamic and forceful drummer who joined the Schulich School of Music Jazz faculty in 2021 alongside Professor Thurman. Professor Green is known for his deep musicianship, extensive experience, and technical expertise. 

For this performance, Thurman and Green will be joined by bassist Paul Beaudry, pianist Yago Vazquez, and trumpeter Greg Glassman. There is no doubt that this all-star ensemble will be in prime form and ready to swing.

Their quintet set will take place at Upstairs Jazz Club, with a cozy, intimate atmosphere that will highlight the ensemble’s nuance and artistic breadth. While this show costs $40 (and a food/drink purchase is required), listeners will not leave the club disappointed.

The musical endeavours highlighted above are far and away exceptional even by the already high standards of the Jazz Festival. Whether or not they’re from McGill, audiences can expect to have a blast witnessing the talent and musicianship being nurtured in our very own Schulich School of Music.

For a complete list of Jazz Fest sets led by current Schulich School of Music students or faculty:

Mafuba (Opening for The Bad Plus): June 26, 9 pm, Théâtre Jean-Duceppe (Paid)

Jean-Michel Pilc Trio: June 28, 6 pm, Le Studio TD (Free)

Ranee Lee: July 2, 7 and 9:30 pm, Upstairs Jazz Bar & Grill (Paid)

Doxas Brothers: June 25, 6 pm, Le Studio TD (Free)

Lex French “Sketches of Miles” 100 ans: June 25, 9:30 pm, Diese Onze Jazz Club (Paid)

Al McLean Quartet Coltrane 100ans: June 27, 9:30 pm, Diese Onze Jazz Club (Paid)

Marianne Trudel Trio: July 4, 9:30 pm, Diese Onze Jazz Club (Paid)

The post The McGill Community takes on the Montreal International Jazz Festival appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Warning: spoilers ahead.

Interviews have been edited for clarity and conciseness. 

On Wednesday, March 26, 2026, the Strand of the Night Theatre’s production of The Seagull, by Anton Chekhov, opened in Moyse Hall. The following evening, I had the opportunity to attend the show and interview the cast; as well as Henry Kemeny-Wodlinger, director and founder of Strand of the Night Theatre. Kemeny-Wodlinger established the theatre company in 2022 to provide young, emerging artists with a platform.

The Seagull takes place at the Sorin estate, where family and friends, many of whom are artists, gather every summer. Over time,  scenes of the quotidian reveal a set of complex relationships and struggles that pose disconcerting questions about what it means to be an artist and a human being. 

“This play, not to be too reductive, is very much about unhappy people,” I began. Kemeny-Wodlinger leaned back and laughed, “But there’s also very much a comedic element to it. So I was wondering how you balance these seemingly contradictory points?”

“The way that Chekhov does unhappy people: they’re very ridiculous. They’re very, very serious about everything they say, and there’s so much passion in everything they say,” replied Kemeny-Wodlinger. He added that on opening night, the audience laughed more than he thought they would at the uncomfortable moments, perhaps purely out of discomfort. Kemeny-Wodlinger elaborated, “[Chekhov] tears down those traditional, uncomfortable or cathartic places. And if it’s an uncomfortable moment, it’s really uncomfortable because there’s a kind of raw violence happening.”

When asked how he got involved in this particular production, Kemeny-Wodlinger recounted his experience with The Seagull, which he had seen for the first time in 2023: “It was the first play that I ever saw where I felt like the characters were saying things that I thought sometimes […] A lot of the characters were artists who were about to go out into the world, about to start making art, and that really connected with me because I feel I’m at the same stage myself. From there, I got really interested in this specific translation of the play [by Simon Stephens].”

As a native Russian speaker who has read the original non-translated text, I was curious about the contemporary nature of the chosen translation. Kemeny-Wodlinger spoke on his choice: “It’s a modern translation set out of time. It’s not really in the original late 19th century, and it’s not extremely modern […] it’s very alive, and it strips away all of the place.” Besides the mention of horses and carriages in Act 2 and Act 4, the play was successful in creating an immersive, timeless setting.

“Some characters dress like they’re from the 80s. Some of them dress like they’re Gen Z. It’s a bit all over the place. And somehow, I feel like it comes together,” said Kemeny-Wodlinger, adding that in working with the costume designer, Sylvia Dai, “there was a certain time period that was the most effective for conveying a character.” This primary focus on the “aesthetic” is evident in Irina’s 50s/60s colorful outfits which are, in my mind, somewhat reminiscent of Emily Gilmore; as well as in Marcia’s 80s leather jacket and emo-inspired look, which ties into the original text’s description of her wearing all black due to her unrequited affection for Konstantin — the protagonist — and detachment from her father Leo (Luca McAndrew). 

What I found especially striking about the costumes was how often they changed.

“There’s 36 costumes in the show, one for each character in each act,” says Kemeny-Wodlinger. In Act 2, the characters all either shed layers of their Act 1 attire or put on lighter summer outfits, corresponding to more emotionally vulnerable scenes where the characters remove some of their mental armor. The one exception is Konstantin (Kit Carleton), a young, struggling playwright who is in love with Nina (Noa De Gasperis), the neighbor who has a difficult home life and dreams of being an actress. Konstantin wears the same outfit for the first three acts of the play: jeans and a trench coat. Perhaps this stagnant wardrobe reflects Konstantin’s inability to adjust his perspectives on life and art until years have passed, when Act 4 is set.

Meanwhile, Nina’s clothes become darker and less carefree as the story and her illicit relationship with Boris (Sam Snyder) — a writer in his forties who is in a relationship with Irina (Celeste Gunnell-Joyce) — progress: she begins with her hair down — clad in delicate white dresses, transitions to a blue and white checkered frock, and finally, in Act 4, dons a black turtleneck, jeans, sneakers, and a trenchcoat, with her hair up in a ponytail. Interestingly, the trenchcoat she wears is Konstantin’s, which, according to the script, he has worn “for the last three years.” Whether this wardrobe choice is meant to imply that Konstantin gave his jacket to her, she took it, or that its meaning is more symbolic of how her mindset has shifted to reflect his more cynical one is not entirely clear. Additionally, the modern sneakers Nina wears hint at a shift away from a stereotypically feminine passivity reflected in her dresses, as she takes charge of her life.

Incidentally, the costumes were certainly not reflective of late 19th-century Russia. The modernization of the text, and the anglicization of character names made the production inherently Chekhovian. Historical context and setting matter quite little in Chekhov’s plays, where the universality of the human experience, and especially human suffering, is foregrounded.

This production excelled at bringing that humanity to each scene and character. Irina, for instance, is a famous middle-aged actress and a blatant egotist. Obsessed with retaining her beautiful, youthful image and celebrity, she constantly sabotages her relationship with her son, Konstantin. While her character is amusing, one would assume by these characteristics that she is villainous; yet, Gunnell-Joyce’s Irina is anything but. There are but a few scenes where Irina explicitly expresses vulnerability or affection, such as when she begs Boris not to leave her for Nina or when she bandages Konstantin’s injured head. Nevertheless, these moments are some of the most powerful. Perhaps even more impactful is how the insecurity and humanity displayed in these scenes are subtly expressed in Irina’s character throughout the play. Even though I was familiar with the characters beforehand, I was still greatly impressed by how difficult it was to hate Gunnell-Joyce’s Irina.

While the play could have opened with a bit more energy, it quickly picked up with Carleton’s powerful opening dialogue. Many characters have striking dialogue, made even more compelling by the actors’ choices. One particularly memorable moment was Boris and Nina’s conversation in Act 2, where, as Kemeny-Wodlinger says, “they each exchange very vulnerable monologues about what they want out of life and their fears.” Boris opens up about his obsessive-compulsive behavior, which taints his work. This neuroticism is brought to life on stage through the physicality of Snyder’s performance. Snyder explained what drew him to this character: “He’s a bit of a tough guy to figure out. He goes through a lot of twists and turns, and there’s some complexity there.”

Shea McDonnell, who plays Hugo, shared a similar sentiment in navigating the intricacies of his character. While McDonnell described Hugo as “a well-established doctor” who displays “arrogance” and “very high self-esteem,” he clarified that Hugo is also “not fully secure inside, [and] could be very anxious about certain things.” This insecurity was most openly displayed in McDonnell’s scenes with Pauline, Marcia’s mother (Naomi Decker). Unhappily married to the estate manager Leo, Pauline has a secret affair with Hugo. McDonnell elaborated on this dynamic: “that really is where those cracks begin to show in his relationship, because he’s a very strait-laced, kind of very clinical person, but his big vice is really sex, and […] every time that she tries to make it more serious, he shuts it down and gets really nervous.” At the end of Act 1, McDonnell also brought this vulnerability to the surface when comforting Marcia (Ellie Mota). 

Even Peter (Griphon Hobby-Ivanovici), the elderly owner of the estate and brother of Irina, whose main role seems to be comic relief, is anything but two-dimensional. As he grapples with old age and regret, I could not help being touched when Hobby-Ivanovici wistfully delivered the line: “I want to live.”

While this is a dialogue-driven play, especially given that Chekhov provided minimal stage directions, some of the most powerful moments are found in its silences. Boris and Nina share multiple searing stares: the first when they initially meet and shake hands for notably longer than necessary; and again in Act 2, standing at opposite ends of the stage after Boris jokingly mocks her. Additionally, Nina gazes out beyond the audience numerous times: in Act 2, for instance, she smiles off into the distance. 

Perhaps most notably, the play is bookended by parallel silent moments. As the play begins, the entire cast walks down the aisles. They freeze in place, spaced out along the rows of seats, and look around at the audience, breaking the fourth wall. Similarly, when Hugo utters the last words of the play, the entire cast, sitting around the dining table on stage, turns their heads to look beyond the audience, falling motionless. This ending’s power is strengthened by the parallel nature of the scene, and its impact is solidified by the meta-quality that rearticulates the play’s themes.

The self-referential aspect of The Seagull is also delved into through the play’s exploration of the human desire to narrativize “disparate events,” as stated in the media release, as well as each of the characters’ unique relationships with art. 

When asked where he stands in relation to the different ideas about art offered in the play, Kemeny-Wodlinger answered that he was not entirely certain, but that he agreed with Konstantin’s sentiment at the end of the play: “I often try to mimic a certain genre or a certain form, but what’s the most powerful to me is something that comes from just deep within that. It just naturally flows out of you as an artist.”

Despite addressing these rather abstract concepts, the production manages to keep the play rooted in a sort of ambiguous reality. The set, designed by Claire Labrecque, plays a big part in this. Vines line the front of the stage, and patches of vegetation sit stage-left up front and stage-right in the back. My personal favorite feature of the set is the plastic pink flamingo that appears amidst the plants at the start of Act 2. The real world seeps in again during Act 4, when rays of sunlight shine through the window of the door Nina enters from stage-left. Though some scenes are set indoors, this natural element remains ever present, perhaps calling on a connection between literal nature and human nature.

Another fascinating element of the set is the shrinking of the stage as the temporary back wall is pushed forward with each act. This choice increasingly adds tension to each subsequent scene while also seeming to signify the claustrophobic oppression many characters experience in the Sorin estate.

The background noise, designed by Kyla Resendes, also plays a big role in the set design. The sounds of unintelligible muttering, chirping birds, running water, and instrumental melodies are interspersed throughout the production; sometimes helping to physically place the characters, sometimes intensifying emotional scenes. 

Another memorable auditory feature of the play was the overlapping conversations heard while characters moved off stage or out of view. In Act 2, the group is heard leaving the Sorin estate, their voices dissipating as they walk further from the stage; and in Act 4, the family is heard once again, eating and laughing in an unseen room stage-right while Konstantin and Nina reunite. The latter scene creates a stark contrast between the happy obliviousness of the off-stage dinner and the emotional turmoil on-stage. Nina’s separation from the bliss beyond the wall is further emphasized when De Gasperis presses her tear-stained face against the door separating her from the meal and Boris, who left her disillusioned but still lovestruck after ending their affair.

From set design and costumes to stage directions and dialogue, the well-thought-out intricacies of the Strand of the Night Theatre’s production of The Seagull combined to create a profound exploration of the human psyche.

The post The Seagull: An Automorphic Play About Art and Humanity appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The artist was born and raised in Montreal Nord’s vibrant community, which played a role in developing her narrative voice early on, writing intimate and cinematic songs straight from the heart. Armed with unbreakable determination and a pure love for music, Cinzia has amassed a dedicated following, as well as strong streaming numbers throughout the years. She has performed at major festivals including Festivoix, Ottawa Bluesfest, Festival sur le Canal, and St. Roch X. Most recently, she performed at Cafe Campus on March 3.

In late 2025, Cinzia released “When I Think About Us,” followed by “Runner” — both tracks included in the newly released EP, The Wax, which was released on March 20, 2026.

“When I Think About Us” kicks off The Wax with an upbeat tune reminiscing on a love that never could be, in spite of its greatness. On the other hand, “Runner” is a slow introspection of the writer’s unhealthy attachment to emotionally unavailable partners. Both singles pave the way for “Thread,” the latest single Cinzia released before sharing her completed EP. The Daily spoke with Cinzia about The Wax, why “Thread” means so much to her, and what the listener should look out for while listening to her work.

This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Youmna El Halabi for The McGill Daily (MD): How did the idea of your new EP come to be? Why “The Wax”?

Cinzia: Most of what I do with Cinzia & The Eclipse is based on the magic of the moon and her cycle. The waxing crescent actually begins this Friday so I thought [it would be] a perfect time to take her beauty and [immortalize] it within the music that we’re sharing.

MD: How did you decide that “Thread” would be the lead single?

Cinza: “Thread” is the song that means [more] to me than anything I’ve ever written for myself. There was something extremely cathartic and therapeutic about writing [about] how I really fell to my knees at one point and would’ve done absolutely anything for the person I love. I know people say that, but in that last relationship I really understood what it meant to love someone unconditionally. I saw every scar, every crack, every ounce of heart, hurt, beauty and ugly of this person, even the parts he thought he was hiding, and I have to admit I loved this person. I would’ve quite honestly walked through fire if it came to it. So when we wrote “Thread,” I didn’t even know I was writing about myself and that relationship. I really thought I was just writing a cute little song until I started to piece the lyrics together and be like, “Ohhh, she was me!!”

MD: What was the people’s response to “Thread,” and what are your thoughts on their reactions?

Cinzia: People locked in, which was really incredible. I had people messaging me in tears because of the chorus, which honestly fills me with gratitude because that chorus is truly a beg. You’re begging for someone to stay, that you’ll become whatever they want. I think the music driving those words and the repetitions really captures the anxious state of mind you end up in when you’re so in love and begging someone to stay.

MD: You’ve put out several EPs throughout the years, and I’m guessing with each one there was a unique process that was followed. What was it like for The Wax during production?

Cinzia: To be honest, I was a pain in the ass with this EP. I’ve become really confident in the sound and elements that I want in my music. These songs have evolved into exactly what I want them to be. In the past, I’ve had a little more of a pop sound, but it never spoke to me as an artist, even though everything [producers] Markybeats and Luca did with those songs is absolutely everything. It’s always a great pleasure to work with friends because they understand me without me having to explain [my vision] too deeply, so I’m really grateful for their talent and friendship.

MD: Describe your writing process from inspiration to creating a song.

Cinzia: I don’t know if I have a process. I think it’s just being real, getting in a room, having real conversations and spinning that into cool lyrics and melodies. That’s the beauty of the arts in my opinion. You’re kind of spinning something out of nothing, something you just pulled out of a subconscious place. I think the more in tune you are with yourself and the universe, the easier it is to tap into songwriting and connect with people. We’re in a hub where all thoughts and experiences cross over. That’s why songs can become so relatable! We’re all living some of the same experiences.

MD: What do you hope people get from the album?

Cinzia: Some closure, maybe some spells they can repeat and chant. I hope people have fun with it and get whatever they need at the time they hear it.

MD: What is your favourite part about performing your new songs versus your old ones?

Cinzia: I’m an impulsive person, so doing anything new will always be where a lot of my excitement lies. I also think these songs are the most real and honest I’ve been, so it’s nice to be able to play music that truly resonates with me as a human.

The Wax is available for listening on all platforms. Cinzia & The Eclipse will resume touring on April 26.

The post The Wax Talk appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Anya Kasuri, TVM President and Post-Credits Editor-in-Chief, attended the event dressed in a sparkling gown and touted the magazine’s sole physical copy. The magazine, which she co-founded alongside TVM’s graphics coordinator, Sascha Siddiqui, encourages authors to thoughtfully analyze their favourite films. Kasuri is in her third year, studying International Development with a double minor in Political Science and World Cinemas.

In an interview with The McGill Daily, Kasuri says, “Film is the medium that influences our everyday character and aspirations.” Not only does it influence you, it allows you to understand yourself: “Critiquing film is a social activity, an intellectual engagement, and at its core, is a self-assessment of your values and beliefs…the meaning you derive from it can be really telling of your character too. ”

Her favourite part of the magazine is the graphics: “[Unlike writing, graphics] provide visuals to cinema…to perfectly complement the [article’s] argument. Sascha [Siddiqui], our graphics coordinator, did an incredible job bridging the gap … When I saw the final [magazine] it was her creativity that grounded the writing back to its roots — an appreciation of cinema.”

“Films should always be critically analyzed this way. I feel like that’s a value that I’ve derived from my film classes, particularly with Professor Ara Osterweil,” she replied when asked about the vision behind the magazine. “The process of watching and experiencing a film is not only viewing it, then going home and going to sleep. It’s about watching it with your friends, watching other people, reacting, [and] hearing everyone’s reactions in the crowd. Afterward, [the experience is about] discussing it as you understand it — because when you come out of a movie, you’re not going to know exactly what you have to say; it’s not a fully fleshed-out thought. When you spend time discussing it, you learn more about it.”

The key difference, for Kasuri, between short- and long-form analysis lies in its depth: “[Long-form analysis] offers full fledged evaluations of films’ formal elements: cinematography, mise en scene, visual tone, colour palette, acting, narrative — being able to evaluate that in a longer form analysis lets you see each film individually…and its directors’ vision apart from one another because you get into the depths of each films’ elements’ meaning[s].” To conclude: “It’s a better, more engaging, intellectual, and educational alternative to short-form media.”

However, she notes that many people forget the core of analysis: what the film wants to be. “A lot of people misjudge pieces of media by applying the same expectations to all [of them]. It’s important to judge a film based on what it’s striving to be…they all have different standards of their visual language, their pacing, their acting, their sets,” said Kasuri.

I encountered Elena Degas at a bar table next to the DJ booth, listening intently to the live band. As TVM’s music composer, she wanted to “provide insight from a musical perspective.” Writing to the Daily, she highlighted how the score was integral to the story: “Sinners was by far the film that impacted me most from the last year, and I felt that it was special in the way that the score/music was so integral to the story and the conversations that were happening around the film.”

Degas got her start in film scoring when she watched Euphoria in 2019. The music was what made her love the show; she found that it could tell a poignant story on its own.

Her favourite part of the article she wrote for Post-Credits was her analysis of the use of blues at the centre of Sinners. It gives the viewer insight into the film’s characters and their struggles. Especially the song “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” demonstrates the turn from oppressed to oppressor in Remmick, an Irishman. It opens up a “space for a larger conversation about the history of predominately Black genres of music and how they’ve evolved and continue to live on today.”

From her article: “It is immediately following [the surreal montage] scene when the people in the juke joint are faced with the vampires, who dauntingly perform an upbeat, folk-inspired rendition of ‘Pick Poor Robin Clean’ for the group.” The song is “a blues song that [embodies] someone trying to survive by picking apart and taking everything they can from a dead robin.”

For Degas, “this jolly folk rendition exemplifies the white vampires’ inability to engage empathetically and thoughtfully with the community they are attempting to infiltrate, and recalls a common pattern in genres such as blues and jazz, in which white musicians have historically appropriated and overshadowed Black artists.” Remmick’s positionality is especially striking because of his Irish heritage and experience with colonialism. His desire to completely consume the music is shaped by a selfish desire to preserve it the way he was unable to with his own heritage. However, in doing so, he reproduces colonial violence, with music becoming a tangible symbol of culture.

TVM has allowed Degas to explore her passion for the soundscape of a movie: “Film is now one of the main cornerstones of my life, I have found a huge love for making music for films at TVM, and have found a great community of other film-lovers here; I now plan on attending film school next year for sound design in hopes of a career in film audio/music!”

McGill’s distinct lack of a creative arts programme is no secret. However, student initiatives like Post-Credits Magazine are working to allow student film lovers to think critically about the art they are passionate about.

TVM will be hosting its largest event of the year, FOKUS Film Festival on Thursday, March 26 at Cinema Du Parc. For more information, visit TVM at tvmtelevision.com or @tvm.television on Instagram.

The post TVM Reveals the First Issue of Post-Credits Magazine appeared first on The McGill Daily.

For clarity, “Shakespeare” will be used in reference to playwright William Shakespeare, William to the husband and Agnes will be referred to by her first name.

Inspired by Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same name, co- written and directed by Chloe Zhao, the film carries arrives carrying considerable weight. After receiving the Oscar for Best Actress for her role as Agnes Shakespeare, Jessie Buckley is all over the media. Critics have described her performance as “devastating” and called it a “radically feminine take on Shakespeare’s family life” — both of which are true. As Buckley said herself, the role offered her a chance to counter a common narrative about the playwright’s wife — that she had “kept [Shakespeare] back from his genius” — and instead to “give the full landscape of what it is to be a woman.” Despite an impressive performance from Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare, I am of the opinion that Buckley steals the show

Set in 16th-century Warwickshire, the story follows Agnes’ navigation of child loss, the shifting dynamics between parents, and both Agnes and William’s journeys traversing their grief, as William writes the play Hamlet about their deceased son. The film opens with a breathtaking shot: a dense forest canopy, an overhead camera slowly tracking down through the foliage to find Agnes positioned at the base, in a fetal position, alluding to Mother Nature. In this, motherhood immediately takes centre stage.

The costume design sustains this theme throughout the film. She is dressed almost entirely in red, set starkly against the dark greens of the forest and the navy blues of Shakespeare and the children. Colours in the film have symbolic messaging: the bedroom covers shift from orange to blue after Hamnet’s death, signifying the turn from familial joy to grief; and the boy himself wears both orange and blue in the scenes before he dies, subtly distinguishing him from his siblings. When Agnes appears in red again at the final reconciliation, it reads as something quietly triumphant. The cinematography by Łukasz Żal reinforces her centrality at every turn — from prolonged close-ups on her face, to wide shots that place her at the centre of the frame while William Shakespeare recedes behind her.

When William Shakespeare decides to move to London, Zhao makes a poignant directorial decision to keep the camera, and thus the story, with the family that stayed behind, framing Agnes’ encouragement as a genuine, costly sacrifice, rather than a passive acceptance

The two birthing scenes are extraordinary in their contrast. The first has Agnes alone in the forest, gripping the roots of a tree in her red dress, giving life as Mother Nature does: in solitude, and in pain. The second, set at home, is stripped of any musical score, the silence making it almost unbearable. The film’s treatment of motherhood is among its most striking qualities. The solidarity between women across generations receives equal care in its portrayal: Agnes’ stepmother’s support during the birth of the twins, the quiet “you can and you will,” and the flashbacks of Agnes as a child having lost losing her own mother to childbirth. Her cry “I want my mum” is one of the rawest lines in the film.

Shakespeare’s absence at the moment of Hamnet’s death is handled with the same weight: the later line, “you should’ve been there,” lands with quiet devastation. Furthermore, Jacobi Jupe, who plays young Hamnet, deserves serious recognition. The farewell scene between Hamnet and William is shot with remarkable composition: an expansive wide angle shot that almost divides the frame between them, both turning back to look at each other laughing, unwilling to leave after saying goodbye.

Hamnet’s death scene devastated the entire cinema. It is rendered with an almost expressionistic, poetic quality: the boy walking away into death, surrounded by painted trees that echo the forest of the movie’s opening scene, the circle of his life quietly closing. The line “I’ll be brave,” delivered with tears barely held back, by candlelight and with Max Richter’s score beneath it, is the film’s emotional peak.

There are moments that feel overly indulgent. The close-up staging of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy, although brilliantly performed by Mescal, disrupts the narrative momentum and feels like a gesture toward theatre enthusiasts rather than something the film has earned. It felt like an attempt to anchor this loose adaptation back to canonical Shakespeare. The final scene also overstays its welcome, the sustained violins drawing out emotion that has already been fully brought out.

As Peter Bradshaw has noted for The Guardian, “on one level, the narrative is a fallacious misreading,” relying heavily on a name coincidence that could be simply that. But he is equally right that it represents a “thrilling act of creative audacity, reaching back through the centuries to embrace Shakespeare and Agnes as human beings.” That is the film’s genuine achievement. It is a story about grief, parenthood and ultimately the unheard characters behind one of the most recognized plays ever written.

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Make no mistake, fanfiction has always existed in mainstream spaces. More romance novels tha you might think are actually Rey/Kylo Ren fanfiction disguised by unsubtle name changes and superficial editing. Fifty Shades of Grey started off as a Twilight fanfiction. Even the Game Changers series (you might know it better as the books from which Heated Rivalry was adapted) is rumoured to have been a “stucky hockey au” [Marvel fanfiction of Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes]. The current problem comes from the shift away from bottom-up decision-making to top-down, from authors deciding to monetize their work to publishing corporations asking for it. Most of all, the problem is the visibility that comes with it, which opens up fandoms to potential outside threats, like angry authors or toxic
nternet users.

Capitalism…
The best thing about fanfiction is that it is a gift from the author to the reader. The first unspoken rule when entering online fandom communities is to respect and appreciate the work that is done. Fanfiction authors write for free in their own time, during their very (infamously so) busy lives. Maybe the story is bad, and the grammar non-existent; there might be no punctuation, or capital letters every three words, but it was written by someone who was passionate and experimenting, and it is frowned upon to criticize them for it.

To someone who has only experienced mainstream online spaces, smaller fandoms can be extremely welcoming. There is a reason for that, (weirdos sticking together if you want to be sappy, but, from a more cynical and realistic point of view): compensation — or the lack thereof. The basis for most of the discourse opposing disparaging comments is that fanfiction writing is a hobby shared out of the goodness of one’s heart. No one owes anyone anything, and one only needs to be kind in return. Yet now, a precedent has been set; money has entered the equation. If once is happenstance and twice a coincidence, it only needs to happen again for money to become enemy action, to become a pattern. And who knows how this new business model will impact the community’s ethos of mutual respect.

But, why are publishing companies picking up fanfiction? The answer — it might surprise you — is also money. Fanfiction, even scrubbed of every trace of the original world and characters, still offers the enormous advantage of a built-in audience, thus guaranteeing automatic return on investment. Fans familiar with the work will buy it, and people, morbidly curious, having heard of the story and its origins by word of mouth, will want to get a glimpse.

A risk for the Harry Potter fandom

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if the original author can no longer maintain plausible deniability about fandom activity, bad things happen. Although a lot of authors, such as George R. R. Martin, operate under a kind of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy regarding fanfiction, others like Anne Rice are not so kind. The author of Interview with the Vampire is infamous in fandom circles for threatening to sue fanfiction writers and going so far as to send a cease-and-desist letter to Fanfiction.net, asking them to remove everything related to her work.

The risk of dragging Harry Potter fan-created content into the mainstream is that it might force a confrontation with the author. As of yet, there have been no such incidents, but how long will that peace last? There has rarely been a fandom with so much genuine, blinding hatred for the original author as the Harry Potter fandom. Most of the time, hate geared towards the original creators of works comes from disappointment with the source material: the ending of Game of Thrones, the blatant queer-baiting in Netflix’s Wednesday, or Veronica Mars’ entire fourth season. People hate the directors for the choices they made. Meanwhile, Harry Potter fans hate J.K. Rowling for personal and political reasons, and that hatred runs deep.

J.K. Rowling’s views about the LGBTQ+ community are very problematic, and if there is one thing to know about fandom, it is that it is queer. Writing fanfiction is not just teenage girls shipping male characters. It’s marginalized audiences reappropriating symbols and characters. It’s incorporating queer themes into originally cis heterosexual media, creating trans plotlines, and discussing internalized homophobia, intersectionality, and the intricacies of consent. Rowling has, historically and with great emphasis, denigrated such social issues. It raises concerns about her potential reaction to an army of fans who curse the ground she walks on. Will she continue to close her eyes and allow fandom communities to operate? That seems like a best-case scenario, but far from the only one. Rowling can decide to co-opt the more supportive and ‘acceptable’ branches of the movement, or even retaliate and wreak destruction on a scale only permissible to billionaires like herself.

Outsiders looking in
Original content creators, authors, and directors are not the only threat that heightened visibility brings to fandom. A more insidious, though no less dangerous one is judgmental internet users who feel entitled to fandom spaces, and refuse to adapt to these spaces’ rules and culture despite having chosen to enter them. Fandom spaces are being forcefully gentrified by individuals who refuse to interact with the more alternative parts of the community. Most people know that fandom is weird, but they don’t really understand it. How are you supposed to explain “Dead Dove, Do Not Eat” to someone who’s never heard of it before? People might like the cute couple or the hot, slightly-but-not-too-problematic relationships, but they might not necessarily be prepared for works that go beyond what is usually socially acceptable.

This is not new: it is happening – and has been for a while – to the fandom and LGBTQ+ communities as a whole. Who is the most relevant? The most marketable? Such debates arise as people discuss the inclusion (or exclusion) of more marginalized sub-groups. Hence, internal hierarchies are created and certain groups deemed ‘other’ by the broader community and audience. In queer circles, underground practices like BDSM get slapped with the label of “sexually deviant” and are excluded from some queer spaces they’d historically been a part of.

Fandoms — fanfiction maybe especially — are close to such subcultures and might face the same progressive sanitisation if shoved to the center stage. When something exists as a subculture, it is easy for it to be more diverse because everyone is equally threatened by the public majority. In recent times, fandoms have grown more visible and attractive; yet only certain facets of them are deemed appropriate to the mainstream public. This can have a negative impact on its internal dynamics, based on trust and respect, as newcomers become influenced by public discourse or are simply ignorant of the community’s culture. Hence, safe spaces previously designed for marginalized communities to exist and thrive are gentrified, becoming another pawn from which capitalist entities can profit.

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The above vignette forms the opening scene from Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette, FX’s newest show that has quickly become a sensation. Speaking to the public’s enduring infatuation with the couple, it is now the platform’s most watched limited series to date, just a month after its release. The limited series tells the story of America’s reluctant “it couple” of the 1990s. Love Story curates the details of Kennedy Jr. and Bessette’s notoriously guarded relationship. Drawing from friends’ anecdotes and media footage we see Bessette fitting Kennedy Jr. for a suit in the Calvin Klein show room, to a proposal on a boat at Martha’s Vineyard, or a fight in Battery Park where Kennedy Jr. pulled off Bessette’s ring. This collage of moments is depicted in the show, with certain shots taking on the grainy quality and square framing of a ’90s era camera, making the restaging obvious of a moment captured by the press. Other production choices appeal to cultural memory, such as the costuming. The show’s crew went to pains to source archival pieces from Yohji Yamamoto and specific items like a green Valentino coat to evoke the image of Besette’s looks, as seen in paparazzi images.

With the series’ clever blending of fiction and reality, it’s easy to believe the iconic couple’s real relationship is finally being revealed. The chemistry between the two leads (Sarah Pidgeon and Paul Anthony Kelly), close-up shots, warm lighting, and the “behind closed doors” setting develops a captivating intimacy. After watching the first few episodes of the show, I had a feeling of hollowness I couldn’t place. Only to discover, I was mourning the couple’s death, over 25 years later.

The intense public investment which Love Story depends on and re-evokes was significant to Kennedy Jr. and Bessette’s relationship. The public’s adoration and collective grief for his father as well as a life in front of the cameras made John F. Kennedy Jr. America’s son, as well as its most coveted bachelor. Any woman Kennedy Jr. dated was held to high standards by the public. The same went for Bessette, who was put under intense scrutiny by the media. She had claimed the man who belonged to America, and these were the consequences.

Having never been in the public eye, Carolyn Bessette was different from all of the women Kennedy Jr. had previously dated. When the show begins, Kennedy Jr. is still dating actress Daryl Hannah. Hannah is adept at handling the paparazzi, as she poses for a few good pictures to get them to go away. This juxtaposes Bessette, who refuses to give any of herself away to the media. She’s the perfect enigma. Her style is the epitome of minimalism. There are only two clips of her voice that circulate online, each under two seconds long. Her attitude defied the public’s insistence on a stake in her relationship. The tabloids called her an “ice queen.”

As the couple’s relationship got more serious, so too did the American public’s investment. In Love Story, Bessette and Kennedy Jr. are swarmed and harassed by reporters who block the entrance to their apartment upon their return from their honeymoon. A few days later, the couple’s car is climbed on and surrounded by photographers, making them unable to drive away. More and more tabloids speculate about Bessette, commonly circulating rumours about a pregnancy based on her appearance. As a result of the intense media attention on the couple, the scope of Bessette’s world becomes smaller. She quit her job as publicist at Calvin Klein, and began to limit public appearances. Love Story imagines the press as anxiety-inducing for Bessette, with close-up shots of her fidgeting hands and slowed camera flashes across her worried face.

This is referenced in the show’s opening. Bessette is first seen being hounded by the media and nervously conforming her appearance to their expectations. Meanwhile, Kennedy Jr. is introduced on his way out of the offices of his magazine George. In contrast to Bessette, he confidently strides down the halls, undisturbed; followed only by his assistant. This immediately establishes the couple’s differing relationship with the media, showing it as particularly crippling for Bessette.

The aggression of the media in Love Story is particularly striking. In another scene, Bessette is pushed into a car door by a mob of reporters. If this is how Love Story sees the American media of the ’90s, then how does it see itself? This is a fine line for the show to walk. The vicious portrayal of the media invites recognition of Love Story itself as equally aggressive and intrusive. Not to mention, with questionable ethics. Despite providing narrative form and an empathetic lens, the show can be deemed as no less invasive than the ’90s tabloids it scrutinizes.

Love Story dramatizes the inner lives of a couple who were notoriously private, undoubtedly adding to the appeal. Its main character is Carolyn Bessette, a woman who never gave a public interview. However, the show often aligns the viewer with Bessette to develop pathos, focusing on her hesitation and nerves as she meets the Kennedy family and faces the paparazzi for the first time. Viewers are invited to identify with Bessette’s position as an outsider to the life of America’s royalty. “They feel like they know us,” says Jackie Kennedy in the show. Her and Kennedy Jr. sit in her apartment, reflecting on their relationship with the American public. Her statement is immediately uncanny, the show’s staging of this intimate conversation giving it a self-reflexive resonance.

A similar moment speaks to me. In the show’s seventh episode, “Obsession”, Bessette opens up to Kennedy Jr. about her struggles with media attention, admitting that it was much harder to handle than she had thought. Overcome with heaving sobs in Kennedy Jr.’s arms, Bessette relinquishes her strong exterior. It is one of the most heart-breaking and vulnerable moments of the show. As their apartment buzzer sounds, she cries out: “They won’t leave us alone.”

The post Another Doomed Love Story: The American Media & Carolyn Bessette appeared first on The McGill Daily.

What does “home” mean to you? 

Is it a person? Where you have lived for decades? Where you were born? 

And what if home was something you could not return to, but carry with you always? 

Such is the sentiment of Yasmeen, “Yas” Kanaan’s most recent exhibition, Carrying Home. Through her art, Kanaan recounted a beautiful story of belonging, the passing down of culture, and resistance. She derives stylistic inspiration from renowned Palestinian artists like the late Ismail Shammout and Sliman Mansour.

This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness. 

The Daily spoke to Kanaan about her exhibition’s theme: “For me, art is a form of culture. And culture is a form of preserving identity, and preserving identity is a form of resistance against oppression. So basically, art is my tool and that’s how I chose the theme for this exhibition.” 

Kanaan is a Palestinian artist with a bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts from the University of Jordan and a master’s degree in Art History from Concordia University. From a very early age, she learned to conceptualize and express her feelings on a canvas. She admired artists like Palestinian political cartoonist, Naji al Ali, best known for his famous caricature Handalah; Kanaan’s patriotism for Palestine drew the attention of her high school teacher. 

“When I was very young, my passion used to come out as anger, and frustration,” she says. “And then I had a teacher, a genuinely good teacher, the type that changes your life, who told me that passion without direction is kind of useless. He taught me how to turn my passion into an educational tool, into something useful for society. And that’s when I unlocked, and started thinking how can art be used as a way to tell a story?” 

After graduating from Concordia University, Kanaan worked as an art historian for six years before applying herself to painting again. 

“Being an art historian and art curator takes me down a different path, and gives me a different perspective on the arts than being an artist,” she says. [But] “ I still have so much to offer as an artist. So I chose to go back to it. And the first painting that I did is the watermelon piece.” 

Long live the Watermelon (2025) is one of the pieces featured in Carrying Home. It shows two watermelons, one cut up in 3 different pieces, ready to be served, and another ripe for the taking, with a beautiful background showcasing embroidery patterns that are anything but random. These patterns are inspired by Kanaan’s mother’s Palestinian embroidery designs, called tatreez, which was the artist’s first love. It was her way of incorporating the importance of passing down heritage and culture, as well as preserving memory – the core themes of her exhibition. 

“My heritage and my art were never separated,” she says. “That’s kind of my automatic identity. 
Every single element in my pieces is part of my everyday life. Even the embroidery pieces, they’re reminiscent of my mother’s jacket that I wear.” Another example Kanaan cites is the frame piece, which she calls “the most important art piece in the exhibit.” “There’s nothing inside it, and it’s over like 60 years old and lived through different exiles from different cities. It was with my family during the Naksa, [also known as the Six Days War of 1967, and] now in Montreal. So, this is part of my identity. It’s carrying home.”  

The theme was also heavily inspired by Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani’s novel, Return to Haifa, which dealt with questions centering around the idea and definition of home. 

“What is home?” Kanaan asks. “Is it the table that’s been there for so many years that became part of the furniture of the house? Is it the language? What is the concept of a home? What is [its definition]? The answer in the book is ‘the will.’ It had an impact on me because I’m also a traveller. Wherever I go, I have my baggage, my home is my bag…It’s no longer a physical place. It’s a collection of traditions, values, recipes, clothing and embroidery, altogether in a bag.”

To be featured in the 11th edition of Montreal’s Filministes Festival was very significant to Kanaan. 

The Filministes Festival is an annual film festival organizing discussions on contemporary feminist issues in Montreal through the screening of cinematographic works, which began in 2015. The festival promotes films and directors from here and abroad, while creating spaces for discussion and reflection for audiences of all kinds. Ultimately, its specificity lies in bridging feminism and cinema.

“This feminist festival is really going for it, and is supportive of otherwise controversial topics,” Kanaan says, “especially in the current context and political climate, where there’s so much anti-immigrant hate. There’s currently a lot of people and policies fueling hate against Arabs [and] Muslims. But the people that I worked with at the festival are very supportive, alhamdulillah.”

“I feel like a lot of feminists like to carry the idea of feminism without actually incorporating the values,” Kanaan continues. “It’s become like a commercial motto for a lot of women because it doesn’t make sense for someone to be a feminist and not take into account causes like the genocide in Sudan, or in Palestine, yet defend someone like Taylor Swift. When it comes to justice, they forget all about feminism. For me, it’s very feminist of me to choose the topic of Palestinian identity as a woman. And even if I wasn’t a woman. I think the cause of Palestine should be directly affiliated with feminism.” 

The Festival Filministes opened its doors from March 4 to March 14, with Carrying Home available for viewing from opening night to March 9. 

For any and all future exhibitions by Yas Kanaan, you can follow her Instagram page for updates. 

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The Golden Village by Karen Cho had its Montreal premiere on February 25th at Cinema du Parc. The 33-minute film, Cho’s most recent work, takes us to Richmond, BC, and the Asian-themed plaza malls and shopping centers that have appeared alongside the massive demographic shift in the area in the last few decades. The event was presented by EYESTEEL and the Jia Foundation, and included a discussion panel with the director Karen Cho, the cinematographer Joshua Frank, and other crew members. 

The Golden Village shows a series of vignettes, diving into the vibrant lives of shop-owners and customers in the distinctly Asian Richmond district. Graded with bright colors, the film expressively portrays the small joys and moments of community in the microcosm of Asian malls. The opening scene where a group of scouts are at a Buddhist temple sets the tone for the film’s theme of space and home-making. Asian communities in The Golden Village are creating intimate communal places in an ever-changing and ever-globalizing landscape, merging their culture and commerce to bring a piece of Asia to North America. 

The lovely people followed by the film give insight into the unique micro-society that breathes life into Richmond malls. The Chinese radio station broadcasters joking about using old single socks as rags drew laughs from the audience, and the egg waffle granny captured hearts. Other characters that stood out were the influencer who started a religion for luosifen, an iconic Chinese noodle dish, the elders who practised aerobic exercises  in the middle of the shopping center, and the TikTok-famous Chef James. By centering the ordinary everyday lives of these individuals, the film uncovers heart-warming stories and completely immerses the audience in the cultural connections and atmosphere portrayed on the screen. 

The Golden Village is especially captivating in the ways it contrasts with Cho’s 2022 documentary, Big Fights in Little Chinatown. Where Big Fights in Little Chinatown is about the struggles and resistance of ethnic minorities against historical erasure and gentrification, The Golden Village instead depicts a new reality for Chinese and Asian immigrants in North American suburbs. During the Q&A panel, Cho explained that she had originally planned to include scenes of modern Asian-themed malls in Big Fights in Little Chinatown. The footage would have argued for the inauthenticity of the “new suburban Chinatown[s]” as a place of commerce and transactionality, as opposed to the historical, long-standing Chinatowns who were fighting to preserve their heritage. The idea was scratched when she found these suburban malls were far from artificial displays of culture; rather, they were places full of life and community, with their own stories to tell. From there, The Golden Village was born. 

Focusing on the “contemporary Chinatown” highlights the experience of newer Asian immigrants living in North American suburbs, refreshingly showcasing  how migrant communities put down roots in their new countries of residence. The increase in the sheer number of members from the Chinese diaspora in Richmond has preceded a cultural shift: being Chinese, or Asian, is no longer a risk, it is cultural capital. As opposed to older generations, who had to fight for their place on an unfamiliar land, adapt to a new culture, and cater to their Western peers and demographics to fit in, newer generations are freed from that burden. 

In fact, while old Chinatowns located in city centers are facing gentrification, the Asian character of businesses in Richmond are actually highly beneficial. As Cho explained during the Q&A panel, revamping the struggling shopping centers to cater to the majority Asian customer base in the area saved them from having to close their doors. The agglomeration of the Asian diaspora in Richmond hence enabled an unapologetic display of their authentic culture as the community became present in large enough numbers to back it up. The immersive footage of the malls in The Golden Village gave the impression of entering a third space separate from the outside: from the uncles singing karaoke in the food court to the footage of traditional Lunar New Year celebrations and lion dances, it felt like a piece of modern everyday life in Asia had been transported to the West. 

The cultural power new migrants possess also allows for innovations that reverse the status quo. For instance, the Richmond night market, which appeared in the film, is one of the largest open air markets in the world, and is a famous tourist attraction. Asian culture in the contemporary Chinatown, or Asian District, can therefore be desirable and empowering, breaking away from the feelings of inferiority or shame older generations might have had to deal with. 
All in all, The Golden Village is a charming and light-hearted watch, telling of hope and community. The vibrant colors of the footage align with the endearing personalities viewers encounter throughout the film, pulling them into the ordinary yet moving everyday stories that take place in the Asian malls in the Richmond suburbs of BC. Although short and simple, the film transmits a heart-warming feeling of belonging amongst diasporic communities, and reminds us to appreciate every joyful moment or interaction no matter how seemingly quotidian.

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In class over the past few months, we have examined the backlash modern artists received for going against the grain — the “grain” being the expectations set by the Art Academy, the Salon where they would show their work, their audience, and, of course, critics. Modern artists like Manet, who portrayed purely modern scenes without conforming to the “grain,” provoked viewership fury. French critic of the time, Émile Zola, argued in an essay titled “Édouard Manet”, originally published in 1867, that public outrage simply reveals how tightly audiences cling to expectations of what art ought to resemble. The public, up until this point, had maintained neoclassical values in art: to flatter, narrate, and moralize. Manet refused all three of those familiar imperatives by producing art that felt uncomfortable and bluntly new — a choice that is now heavily applauded. True art, a point Zola returns to time and time again, does not come from a desire to conform to norms or follow the “grain” but from individual temperament and personal vision. 

Nearly two centuries later and across the Atlantic, my girlfriends and I visited the Cineplex on Rue Sainte Catherine to watch Emerald Fennell’s 2026 “Galentines” adaptation of “Wuthering Heights”. The reaction to the film was generally varied. Some praised it, while lovers of the novel jumped to Twitter and Reddit to vent their anger over yet another inaccurate adaptation. To give credit to these bibliophiles, Fennell abandons many of the themes that make this story so impactful by portraying a narrative based on her initial impression of the book as a 14-year-old girl. In depicting this youthful interpretation, Fennell centres the film around a glorified toxic romance between Catherine and Heathcliff. Frustrated viewers were appalled at Fennell’s tone-deafness in foregrounding obsessive love while sidestepping and softening the harsher themes of the novel, particularly those pertaining to Heathcliff’s racial marginalization and the systemic class violence in the setting. 

In reading tweets alleging the film’s negligence, just as I did in December when choosing my winter semester electives, I turned to modern art history. Two hundred years apart, both Manet and Fennell have something in common: they’ve both committed to their personal visions and rejected traditional expectations. Manet counters aesthetic norms and produces art that depicts the tensions of modern life in a way that is truthful to himself. Similarly, Fennell abandons the expectation that adaptations be reflective of their source material to create a film rooted in her own experience, a decision Zola might have applauded. Whether or not you enjoy or even “agree with” either of these artist’s work, they both made the choice to commit to their personal truths and abandon external expectations. In practicing artistic autonomy, they choose their own temperament as an anchor in their work. 

If these two artists are correct and individual temperament is the “True North” of art, it leads us to question: are there traditions or expectations that artists must uphold, or is personal vision all that truly matters? Between these contexts, “tradition” is understood very differently. For Manet, “traditions” are expectations set by the Art Academy surrounding what defines academically valid (and objectively good) art. For Fennell, “tradition” underlines the source material from which she draws her film: Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Both these artists abandon tradition in their works, making audiences question: where is the line drawn between artistic autonomy and deviations from tradition? 

In deviating from tradition, one can question the difference between innovation and avoidance. 

If artists do have a responsibility to uphold a certain tradition, both Manet and Fennell have failed to do so. Yet we celebrate Manet as a transformative turning point in modern art history. Why? In my opinion, it is because Manet’s work denies the comfort of ignorance and bluntly presents his audiences with uncomfortable social realities, forcing them to analyze their own lives through his work. In contrast, Fennell’s Wuthering Heights does exactly the opposite. While she also deviates from “tradition”, she does so by refusing to inherit the uncomfortable and darker themes of the novel. She allows her audiences to find comfort in the avoidance of difficult themes surrounding the intersection of violence, race, and class. If Manet makes audiences question how closely art should adhere to academic standards, Fennell forces them to question how much personal vision we are willing to accept in interpretations of classic narratives. 

In some cases, we respond well to moving away from tradition when artists depict their personal visions because it feels honest and revealing, confronting you with art rooted in social reality. This is what Manet did in pulling at the seams of academic art to reveal true modern life. On the other side of the coin, moving away from tradition can feel dishonest if viewers don’t feel it is rooted in these social truths — the very social truths that made Emily Brontë’s novel so impactful in the first place. 

Now, as I wrap up this article in my student apartment a few streets from campus, I have to conclude that this argument is somewhat of an open-ended question. I think that is because there is no universal line that separates avoidance from innovation in art. That line is unstable by design, and artists have always toed it by pushing their own personal vision forward while balancing a respect for tradition. Perhaps this tension is what produces great art. That being said, in my art history class, we are still marveling at Manet’s impact on the evolution of modern art two centuries later. But as I left the Cineplex on Sainte Catherine after seeing Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, I got the impression that this particular adaptation might not make it onto the syllabus of a film class in another two hundred years. 

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