Private Project

A Queer's Guide to Spiritual Living

In a collage of observational footage, journal entries, poetry, and animations, A Queer's Guide to Spiritual Living celebrates the many surprising intersections of faith and queerness in the lives of four queer folks from various religious contexts.

  • Ari Conrad Birch
    Director
  • Michal Heuston
    Director
  • Ari Conrad Birch
    Producer
  • Michal Heuston
    Producer
  • Wayne Burns
    Executive Producer
  • Yazmeen Kanji
    Story Editor
  • Aashay Dalvi
    Story Editor
  • Brittany Nguyen
    Director of Photography
  • Cindy Long
    Editor
  • Grace Katie Dixon
    Composers
  • Dylan Lodge
    Composers
  • Mitchell Keys
    Motion Graphics Designer
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Feature
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 15 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    February 15, 2023
  • Production Budget:
    40,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Canada
  • Country of Filming:
    Canada
  • Language:
    English
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Ari Conrad Birch, Michal Heuston

Michal Heuston (they/them) and Ari Conrad Birch (they/he) are a creative duo based out of Toronto, Canada working primarily in documentary media.

Michal's credits include assistant editor on Lido TV (CBC Gem), editor of BODY SO FLUORESCENT, a short that premiered at the Inside Out Festival in 2020, episode editor on the recently released second season of CBC’s Farm Crime, creating an artist feature short for CBC Arts, and co-editor and post-production supervisor on Nancy’s Workshop (CBC Short Docs, 2019).

Conrad's work includes directing Leaving Vernon (2018), a short doc selected for the Yorkton Film Festival, co-writing the narrative short Professional Bride (2019) which received the award of distinction at Canada Shorts Film Festival, producing The Body & The Binary (2020), an audio documentary featured in Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s Queer Cabaret, and editing Fatten (2022-present), a fat activism podcast. Outside of his artistic projects, Conrad works as the Media & Programming Coordinator for Story Money Impact, mentoring other filmmakers and contributing to the impact campaigns of Canadian documentaries such as Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy, No Visible Trauma, QUINN, and The Magnitude of All Things.

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Director Statement

As chosen siblings and forever collaborators, we first and foremost made this film for each other. In the 2020 lockdowns, when there was little else to do besides sit on a couch with a friend and try to find new things to talk about, we began to explore our unique and complicated relationships with religion. Both of us were raised evangelical Christian and neither of us practice those faiths today. Sharing our experiences of coming into our queerness within religious communities was healing, and we began to dream up ways we might be able to have similar conversations with other folks.

We weren’t trauma-mining, we knew based on our own histories that there was as much joy to be found in these stories as there was frustration. And we also knew that usually these stories get told for the benefit of religious audiences; films similar to ours often ask “how can religious communities become more accepting of queer people?”. So instead, we asked “what do we wish our fellow queers understood about their spiritual and religious community members?” and set about designing a film that would be as bright, manifold, and proud as the community we claim. We like to say that this is a movie without much conflict. Aren’t we all a little tired of stories like these being total bummers anyway? Instead, we invite the audience to experience the same beauty that we got to experience: to meet four incredible queers and fall in love with them all. By the end of the film we hope viewers find themselves inspired by the breadth of this community, and see how lucky we all are to share things in common with folks like these.