Urinal

A motley crew of famous dead artists, including Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, are mysteriously summoned to the garden of two long-dead Toronto sculptors. Their mission? To research the policing of washroom sex in Ontario and propose solutions to this serious crisis for the gay community. Of the group, Dorian Gray is mandated to infiltrate the police force as an undercover ‘gay’ agent.
Part narrative and part documentary, Urinal weaves together a dazzling array of film, video and computer animation effects to explore the politics of public sex and the policing of sexuality in society. The six dead artists reluctantly embark on their ‘research,’ and discover that hundreds of men are arrested in Ontario each year on washroom sex charges. Victims of police entrapment and video surveillance, their names are often published in local newspapers, and their lives are destroyed. Some have even committed suicide. Documentary interviews with Svend Robinson, Canada’s first out-of-the-closet gay member of parliament, gay activists and men who have been charged with ‘gross indecency’ are juxtaposed with humorous slide lectures and dramatic reconstructions.
The key to these various concerns seems to be the portrait of Dorian Gray (as painted by Frida Kahlo) – but someone has hidden it in the upstairs attic washroom.
“Funny, sociologically jolting first feature…it makes its points by blending humour with facts about pervasive homosexual discrimination.” – Variety.