Telus StoryHive

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Type of funding body
corporate  
Description

STORYHIVE gives underrepresented communities in British Columbia and Alberta an opportunity to share their stories on the Canadian Broadcasting System. Through various programs we provide production funding, training, mentorship and distribution on TELUS Optik TV.

Telus Storyhive. “About StoryHive.” Accessed April 21, 2025. https://www.storyhive.com/about.
Work funded
  • The drag artist Maiden China stands between two chairs looking to the right. Behind them is a window with Chinese-style lattice work, and banners with Chinese Characters. Maiden China wears heavy white face-makeup, a sequinned bodysuit, and has a shaved head.

    The drag artist Maiden China stands between two chairs looking to the right. Behind them is a window with Chinese-style lattice work, and banners with Chinese Characters. Maiden China wears heavy white face-makeup, a sequinned bodysuit, and has a shaved head.

    Yellow Peril: Queer Destiny (2019)

    film/video, 2019

    In 2019, we produced Yellow Peril: Queer Destiny – an experimental documentary film that follows the story of Vancouver-based drag artist, Maiden China (Kendell Yan), and her explorations of racial, cultural, diasporic, sexual, and gender identity. In the development of this film, we wanted to experiment with imagery that reflected the spiritual, metaphysical, cosmic, interpersonal, relational experiences of our queer and cultural identities. As a filmmaking methodology, we employed the metaphor of the “Five Elements” in Chinese culture to explore the discursive formation of queer Chinese diasporic identity. The “Five Elements” also have many different applications to understanding life, identity, relationships, health (relationships between organs); they’re also known as the Five Phases, the Five Agents, the Five Movements, Five Processes, the Five Steps/Stages and the Five Planets; each element is related to a sensory organ, to taste, and to smell. The elements also have numerous approaches to understanding ways of “being”; they also have principles of metaphysics, and temporalities. We invoked these five elements through the cinematography, as a conduit to understanding queer East Asian cultural formations, as not an intellectual delineation, but a way to investigate the embodiment of queer Chinese, diasporic identity.