For Session 39, Jamie Ross, winner of the Jeune tête d'affiche 2025 contest, will present excerpts from his upcoming film, followed by the North American premiere of Sam Ashby's Sanctuary.

Ross's film explores the sexual history of Montreal’s Mount Royal Park from the Victorian era to today. In Sanctuary (2024), Ashby explores queer spirituality and utopian sexual movement of Purusha Androgyne Larkin (1934–1988), a monk, pioneering gay filmmaker, and self-proclaimed cosmic-erotic mystic. Larkin’s 1981 book, The Divine Androgyne, challenged repression with a spiritual vision rooted in eroticism and presented a radical path to cosmic-erotic consciousness through ‘extreme’ forms of sexual pleasure. 

Over the last 15 years, the two artists have developed film work that deals with cases of queer utopian experiments, connecting complex legacies of queer world-building from Montreal to England, to the American Southwest.