Pleasure Dome, Toronto, ON (2026)

06/07/2026

Join us tonight! Pleasure Dome is proud to serve as a Community Partner for the 2026 iteration of Q***r Cinema for Palestine (QCP), hosted by the Toronto Q***r Film Festival (TQFF).

This is a low barrier event with pay what you can and free options.

Proceeds from tickets will go towards alQaws for Sexual & Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society who were foundational in establishing critiques of pinkwashing.

When: Sunday, June 7th at 7:00pm (Doors open at 6:30pm)
Where: Paradise Theatre, 1006c Bloor St W, Toronto

Programme:

05/07/2026

This Thursday, May 8, join us at TIFF Bell Lightbox for a special screening of Seoul-born, Toronto-based filmmaker Helen Lee’s early works. “Outside the Frame: The Films of Helen Lee,” programmed by Jacob Crepeault and co-presented by Pleasure Dome.

We will be screening the films from the original 16mm prints! We are proud to be the community partner for this screening at , recognizing the importance of Lee’s experimental practice.

Introduction by TIFF Cinematheque programmer Jacob Crepeault who will be joined by filmmaker Helen Lee for a Q&A following the screening.

For over 30 years, Seoul-born, Toronto-based filmmaker Helen Lee has created captivating worlds that explore Asian Canadian experiences through a feminist, transnational approach. In her work, Western perceptions of diasporic communities in Canada are dismantled in favour of sensitive, sensual character studies. In her recent essay film, Paris to Pyongyang (2024), Lee ponders whose stories get told throughout history and why others are left behind with questions like: “What is outside the frame? What can we not see? What cannot be shown?”. These inquiries have been at the core of all of her magnetic early works, from her debut, Sally’s Beauty Spot (1990), which defies fetishistic and colonial representation of Asian women, allowing her sister Sally to reclaim her s*xual agency, to the erotic, playful Prey (1995) that positions the in*******al relationship between Sandra Oh (TIFF ’24 Official Selection Double Happiness) and Adam Beach (TIFF ’23 Official Selection Hey, Viktor!) as a radical force where love transcends cultural differences. Helen Lee was last at the Festival with Tenderness (TIFF ’24), and before that presented her only feature film The Art of Woo (TIFF ’01) and many of her short films throughout her career. - Jacob Crepeault

05/06/2026

This Thursday, May 8! Pleasure Dome co-presents Outside the Frame: The Works of Helen Lee, a retrospective of work by experimental Korean-Canadian filmmaker. Curated by Jacob Crepeault and co-presented with TIFF Bell Lightbox, this program showcases four of Lee’s early experimental works in their original 16mm and 25mm print formats. In her 2024 essay film, Paris to Pyongyang, Lee ponders whose stories get told throughout history and why others are left behind with questions like: “What is outside the frame? What can we not see? What cannot be shown?”. These inquiries have been at the core of her magnetic early films.

When: Thursday, May 7, 7:00pm

Where: TIFF Bell Lightbox, Cinema 4, 350 King Street West, Toronto

Tickets for this program can be purchased through TIFF’s official platform (link in bio).

Programme:

Helen Lee, Sally’s Beauty Spot, 1990, 16mm print
Helen Lee, Subrosa, 2000, 35mm print
 Helen Lee, Prey, 1995, 16mm print  
Helen Lee, My Niagara, 1992, 16mm

The screening will be followed by an extended, in-person conversation with the filmmaker.

Content advisory: nudity, s*xually suggestive and explicit s*x scenes, depiction of attempted su***de

04/13/2026

Pleasure Dome is pleased to announce that our annual call for submissions is now live as of Monday, April 13! We welcome works to be considered for our open call (short, medium, long films, and expanded media), and for our annual New Toronto Works screening. Please note that in order to be eligible for New Toronto Works 2026, the artist must be based in Toronto or the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), and the work must have been made in the past 12 months. The deadline for submissions is June 1, 2026 (11:59 pm EST).

We are also accepting submissions to our open call, which can be from artists from anywhere in the world who have an experimental practice.

02/04/2026

NOTICE is hereby given that the Annual General Meeting of the Members of PLEASURE DOME is called for and will be held ONLINE on Sunday, March 1, 2026 at 12:00 pm ET. As our membership, your vote at this meeting is vital to the health of our organization. We hope you will join us.

09/25/2025

✦ New Toronto Works 2025 — Tonight! Thursday, September 25, Innis Town Hall, Doors at 6:30pm/Event at 7pm ✦

✨As part of our countdown, we’re spotlighting some of the artists whose works will premiere this evening.✨

🌱Sankofa, directed by Ian Keteku and Komi Olafimihan🌟

A poetic Afrofuturist film presented in five tableaux: Sankofa—Reach Back and Get It, Revolution, Reparations, Thomas Sankara Movement (Sankaraism), and Anti-Black Racism. This experimental short film provides context to a poem by the artist, featured in his book “Three Hundred Poems.”

Ian Keteku is a writer and multimedia artist who has written and directed projects for The National Film Board of Canada, CBC, PBS, and Sesame Street. An award-winning poet, Keteku is also the 2010 World Poetry Slam Champion.

09/25/2025

✦ New Toronto Works 2025 — Tonight! Thursday, September 25, Innis Town Hall, Doors at 6:30pm/Event at 7pm ✦

✨As part of our countdown, we’re spotlighting some of the artists whose works will premiere this evening.✨

🟥 African American Express by Sydnie Baynes 🟥

African American Express is an abstract animation exploring the impact of consumerism in the Black community. Drawing inspiration from the aesthetics of Soviet propaganda and Robert E. Weems’ 1998 novel Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century, Baynes critiques patterns of excessive materialism and their ties to identity, capitalism, and cultural heritage. Through bold visual metaphors and symbolism, the film invites viewers to reflect on the cultural and political implications of consumption. From the artist: “Some of my favorite short films are animated Soviet propaganda films. I grew up watching these films from a young age.”

09/25/2025

✦ New Toronto Works 2025 — Tonight! ✦

✨As part of our countdown, we’re spotlighting some of the artists whose works will premiere this evening, Thursday, September 25, at Innis Town Hall.✨

🌀 The Rod and the Ring by Iraqi-Canadian artist Hala Alsalman 🌀

The conjoined rod and ring—an ancient Mesopotamian symbol held by divine beings—appears across millennia of cylinder seals and wall reliefs. Scholars still debate its meaning; one recent theory suggests it embodies the dual nature of time: the finite and the eternal.

Filmed across Iraq, this dreamlike film explores the rod and ring’s potent symbolism and how it could manifest in the future.

Hala Alsalman is an Iraqi-Canadian multidisciplinary artist with a strong background in both journalism and filmmaking. Her art practice is grounded in questioning gender relations, political power and history-making through collage, cinema and ceramics. As an MFA candidate at OCAD U, her thesis proposed dreaming as an archeological method for excavating possible futures were lost ancient wisdom resurfaces. Her films include Bêtes Humaines (2011), funded by TV5 Québec and selected at Newport Beach and Rendez-Vous du Cinéma Québecois, and Haifa Street (2017), co-written and co-produced with Mohanad Hayal, winner of awards at Doha, Cairo, Busan, and Carthage.

Join us tonight (Thursday, September 25) at Innis Town Hall for The Rod and the Ring and other new works by Toronto’s moving-image artists.

📍 Innis Town Hall
📅 Thursday, Sept 25 — Doors 6:30pm, Screening 7:00pm
🎟️ Free admission, non-ticketed

08/30/2025

Don’t miss “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk” by Sepideh Farsi at the Toronto Palestine Film Festival. We’re thrilled to co-present this screening on Saturday, September 27 at 5:00 pm. Get your tickets at www.tpff.ca

At the beginning of the genocide, Iranian-exiled director Sepideh Farsi naively sought a way into Gaza to cover the unfolding genocide. In the course of her failed mission, a contact connected her with acclaimed Palestinian photographer and poet Fatma Hassona. While the two had differing views on religion, Middle East politics and exile, their curiousity of each other’s lives resulted in an unlikely friendship over the course of their regularly scheduled glitchy video calls. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk offers an intimate, first-hand perspective on life under genocide in Gaza, through the video calls between Sepideh and Fatma. Tragically, Fatma was killed with her family, in a targeted Israeli airstrike on her home on April 16, 2025 - just one day after she celebrated the announcement of the film’s selection at Cannes. Combining raw immediacy with deep humanity, the film portrays daily life during the genocide through the eyes of a young Palestinian caught in a lifetime of Israeli military aggression and siege.

08/01/2025

On now through August 10 (online through the Pleasure Dome website, link in bio). 🗺️ Dislocated Visions: Experiments in Representing Place brings together ten works by artists from Canada and internationally who engage with moving image as a method of thinking through place—where place is not a fixed site but a layered and shifting impression shaped by lived experience, memory, displacement, and the technologies of perception. Spanning geographies from Iran and Ukraine to Finland and North America—as well as the human body—these works attend in experimental ways to territories marked by colonialism, extraction, migration, and resistance.

Seen here: (1-3) Ella Morton, Crushed Between Ocean and Sky, 2023; (4) Ayla Dmyterko, On Volya: Filling in the Frescoes, 2023; (5) Jaime Black and Lindsay Delaronde, When Land and Body Merge, 2020

Pleasure Dome

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