The short films of Don Bapst (https://www.donbapst.com) use experimental cinema techniques within a narrative structure to give a voice to the marginalized and the forbidden. 

Chris, his short bilingual film about a cisgendered gay man’s romantic encounter with a transman, earned the filmmaker a Best Up and Coming Toronto Filmmaker award at InsideOut in 2010. That same year, his hybrid documentary How to Immigrate to Canada became a part of the archives at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier One in Halifax. Modeled, his 2012 portrait of photographer G. Elliott Simpson, was shot in a mixture of high-definition video, 16 mm, and Super 8 and explored the role sex and art play in transcending the violence of homophobia. That same year, his documentary poem Good Grief incorporated archival Super 8 footage into a personal portrait of the role of art in the grieving process.

In 2023, Bapst earned an MFA from York University where he made Doppelgänger as his thesis film, which went on to open for Chocolate Babies at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival. The filmmaker is also a novelist, playwright, and translator, whose English translation of Gabrielle Wittkop’s Le Nécrophile was called a “masterpiece” by The Guardian. Bapst earned his first MFA from Brooklyn College where he studied under the direction of the late Allen Ginsberg.