Panic!: The Fruit Machine – POSTPONED
- Tuesday, October 22, 2024 / 7:00 PM - 9:30 PM (PDT)
- Pollock Theater
- Screening Format: 4K digital Projection (81 minutes)
- With Sarah Fodey (producer/writer/director)
Update (10/15): Due to circumstances beyond our control, this event has been postponed. We are currently working on setting a new date for this screening, and will make this information available as soon as possible. Once a new date is confirmed, all existing reservations will be honored.
As cold war anxieties surged in the middle of the twentieth century, Western governments became fixated on fears of Communist infiltration. In the US and Canada, these fears sparked a panic that people with so-called “character weaknesses,” including gays and lesbians, were susceptible to foreign blackmail, and thus constituted a national security threat.
In The Fruit Machine, filmmaker Sarah Fodey examines the extraordinary toll that this panic took on the lives of LGBTQ+ people working in the Canadian military and civil service in the postwar period. Beginning in the 1950s and lasting until 1992, the Canadian government undertook a sweeping purge of suspected homosexuals from its ranks. Working with researchers at Ottawa’s Carleton University, the government even attempted to develop a machine—known as the fruit machine—for detecting homosexual tendencies in its employees. Intimate and revealing, The Fruit Machine is a timely account of what happens when institutional homophobia collides with political paranoia and the dubious promises that so often accompany new technologies.
In this event, filmmaker Sarah Fodey will join moderator Tyler Morgenstern for a post-screening discussion of The Fruit Machine.
This event is free but a reservation is recommended in order to guarantee a seat.
Biographies
Sarah Fodey, producer/director/writer
Sarah Fodey is an Ottawa-based filmmaker and queer advocate. Her career in film and television has spanned twenty years and a variety of projects. Sarah conceived of the idea for The Fruit Machine in the early 2000s after learning of Canada’s decades-long witch hunt against homosexual public servants and military personnel. The film required a lengthy development process, which evolved in tandem with the journey to justice for the survivors of Canada’s LGBT purge. After the release of The Fruit Machine, Sarah wrote and directed Sex, Sin & 69, a feature documentary that unpacks the partial decriminalization of homosexuality in Canada in 1969. Sarah has a BA in English Literature from Queen’s University and an Honors Diploma in Television Broadcasting from Algonquin College. She is a managing partner at SandBay Entertainment.
Tyler Morgenstern, moderator
Tyler Morgenstern is Assistant Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center and an alumnus of the UCSB Film and Media Studies PhD program. As a scholar, his research focused on the media and technological cultures of empire and settler colonialism. He completed his dissertation, Colonial Recursion and Decolonial Maneuver in the Cybernetic Diaspora in 2021, and has published in journals including International Journal of Communication, Media+Environment, and Synoptique. With Krista Lynes and Ian Alan Paul, he is also co-editor of Moving Images: Mediating Migration as Crisis (Transcript Verlag, 2020).
This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center
CWC Presents: Panic!
The Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2024-25 feature series Panic! explores the complex relationship between media, an anxious public, and the turbulent currents of social, cultural, and moral panic. The series will examine how such panics have appeared on screen over the decades, but also consider how the screen itself—as technology, as gathering space, and as a site of fantasy and desire—becomes the object of reactionary backlash. Panic! will be a yearlong showcase of the films, discourses, and cultural practices that have tested the limits of public acceptability, and that have much to teach us about the cycles of panic that define our own political moment.
CWC Docs
The Carsey-Wolf Center is committed to screening documentaries from across the world that engage with contemporary and historical issues, especially regarding social justice and environmental concerns. Documentaries allow filmmakers to address pressing issues and frame the critical debates of our time.