If you thought that Mt. A students were way too busy with schoolwork to have time for writing, producing, directing and filming a movie, you might be wrong. For those with little-to-no free time, the Drama and Screen Studies (DSS) Society came up with a solution 一 what would happen if you were only given 48 hours to make a movie? A comedy, a disaster, a masterpiece, or all of the above?
Last weekend, the DSS Society hosted an annual 48-hour film festival opening where groups of students were challenged to make a movie within the span of two days. To get their creativity flowing, the four groups that participated were given props, for example a camera and a cup, that they had to use in their films.
The four contestants, There is only room for one, A Silent Killer, Ephemeral Whispers of an Autumnal Dissonance: A Meditation on the Passage of Time in five uneven Acts, and My Mother’s Fucking Bucket were presented at the film screening at the Motyer-Fancy Theatre. Judging based on the loudness and cheerfulness of the applause, fair adjudicator Paul Griffin announced A Silent Killer the winner of the 2025 48-hour film festival. Congratulations to the winners!
Another exciting event from the Mt. A drama community that occurred this past weekend was The Cabaret of Queerosities 一 a drag show presented by Mama Didi (also known as Crake fellow Jay Whitehead) and the students of DRAM-3991 Queer Performance class that was hosted by Ducky’s. It was a drag debut for most of the performers, with the exception of Benny Dreadful (Maya Noëlle) and abWHOREnt (Ben Blue) who participated in the drag workshop with Whitehead last fall.
For the audience, The Cabaret of Queerosities was a fun way to spend Friday evening but for the performers it was an assignment that they were being graded on. Let’s leave the academics for the students, but as far as the audience was concerned, they all got an A+.
The drag show was a part of the unit on queering gender, commented Whitehead. Their idea for this unit was to task the students with exploring their gender through drag while also “moving away from the ‘traditional’ idea of drag, where a cis man dresses up as a femme.” The show featured many varieties of drag performers, including drag queens, kings, and creatures.
This is the first time Whitehead has taught queer theatre with a focus on performance. His idea was based on queerness being a very personal entity and how queer performance can be taught from such a perspective. As Whitehead shared, “we started with the term ‘queer’ and what it means for each student,” keeping the term broad, “queer as in LGBTQIA+, queer as in ‘other’ or ‘weird’, queer in its content or form, anything that is outside of the status quo in the theatre world.”
In contrast to a queer-centred courses and workshops that Whitehead teaches now, they had an opposite experience being a drama student twenty years ago. “I was told I was far too effeminate as a man to ever be a marketable actor,” Whitehead remembers. Being told to conform to the heteronormative standards “challenged [their] confidence but pushed [them] towards authenticity in [their] work,” they concluded.
Rachel Liddell, a third-year drama and classics student, talked about their time taking the course. As someone who had never taken a course concerning queer history and performance on a university level, they find it liberating having “a queer focused course” with Whitehead as a professor, who is “very accommodating for queer students.” Some of their goals in taking the course are “exploring new sides about [themselves] and [their] drag character, Clit Eastwood” as well as “getting more comfortable on stage, improving [their] confidence, getting more comfortable with expressing [their] gender fluidity and queerness.” As they talked about the process of developing their drag character, “discovering Clit and finding out who he is, is really liberating and is making me more comfortable with myself.” A part of trans experience is finding comfort in one’s body and identity, and discovering their drag persona who is “a part of [Liddell] but someone ‘outside’ of [them]” was mind opening.
Being a drama and screen studies student is definitely not the easiest, but it provides a lot of opportunities for creativity, to discover yourself and your interests. To learn more about DSS events, be sure to visit the Drama and Screen Studies Department pages on the Mt. A website and their Instagram @dramanandscreenmta.
