SCREEN | A Queer Circle – 'Someone Like Me' x DOXA 2021

"I moved to Vancouver from Toronto in order to be gay."

DOXA Documentary Film Festival

NFB's queer documentary, Someone Like Me, follows a gay Ugandan asylum seeker, Drake, as he struggles to find a sense of freedom and independence within his new local community. Subjects include a varied assortment of eleven strangers (called "the circle") connected to Rainbow Refugee, a non-profit group matching LGBTQIA+ asylum claimants with Canadian sponsors, as they try to help his resettlement.

Filmed throughout Vancouver before and during the pandemic and told through an outsider lens, directors Sean Horlor and Steve J. Adams provide a compelling portrait of being queer in Canada as both a native and foreigner. This includes all the disagreements and passive-aggressiveness within many of its communities’ subcultures as many in the circle quickly fall off. It’s a very personal journey beyond sexual identity captured through different perspectives in refreshingly blunt ways.

Using Drake's refugee story as a gay Black man from Africa as its core focus, Someone Like Me is often more interested in the parallel identities of the other queer, trans, and people of colour around him and the personal issues they are dealing with framed within his year-long quest of resettling.

Someone Like Me screens virtually as part of the 2021 DOXA Documentary Film Festival online and is available to stream until May 16th. It also screens live for the DOXA Drive-In at the PNE Amphitheatre on May 14th.


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