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Stephen Dunn: It's inspired by my childhood growing up as a gay teenager in Newfoundland. When I was a kid there was a series of horrible gay hate crimes that happened in the city. The most violent one happened in the graveyard behind my school, where this kid was literally sodomized with a branch and then he killed himself two years later. It was really fucking powerful and disturbing and devastating for the islands, because Newfoundland is a really safe place. People were shocked.
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I'm by no means urging people to not move away, because travel is really important for self-growth. It's an easy solution, but for me it's too easy. I went back and forth for a while between Newfoundland and Toronto, and ultimately I did move. But as soon as I did, I realized how important Newfoundland is to me, and the distance only made me want to go back more. It's always going to be a huge part of me.It's too simple a solution to just say, "Move away and all your problems will go away." Because that's not necessarily true. I wanted to switch the focus away from moving out of your small town, to getting your own independence. That doesn't necessarily mean having to leave your history behind. It's about creating your own world, no matter where that is. I have a lot of friends who haven't left Newfoundland, and I think it's judgmental of me to say you should leave. I don't think that's true. I think people should be staying.
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Too many Newfoundlanders are leaving the island. My next film, What Waits for Them in Darkness, is essentially about that, the Newfoundland resettlement. It's this period that began in the 60s, after Newfoundland joined Canada. There were 50,000 people who lived on smaller islands around the coast. It was too expensive to get running water, electricity, education, and healthcare to them, so the government forced these people to move. But they didn't give them enough money to do it. So they were forced to drag their houses across the Atlantic Ocean and relocate on the mainland.And it's continuing to happen. The younger people are moving to St. Johns, and the people in St. Johns are moving to Toronto or Vancouver, and everyone is slowly leaving. I feel like that is such a fucking shame. Because Newfoundland is so unique. It has a distinct cultural heritage that is unlike anything in North America.If folks can't make it to TIFF to check out Closet Monster, is there something of yours they can watch online?
Pop-Up Porno! It's a series of shorts about online dating sexual experiences, told through these raunchy, playful pop-up books. I wanted to talk about people's experiences as a way of normalizing them. But it's not just a goofy funny series about online hookups. It is that, but it's also about real human experiences derived from these digital hookups. These experiences people are having can be really quite powerful.There are three out now, but the series is interactive. Our content is going to be created by the viewers watching it. Each film ends with a link that brings people to popupporno.org, where they can either phone in and leave a voicemail, or send in an email with their story.Follow Hugh Ryan on Twitter.