barbara findlay, QC, prefers to see her name in lowercase letters. She is a renowned rights activist and lawyer whose life and whose work for LGBTQ and indigenous people are revealed in In Particular, barbara findlay, a 54-minute documentary brilliantly directed by Becca Plucer and released at film festivals in 215. barbara findlay describes herself as a lawyer, and therefore a member of a privileged group, who did not herself have the same civil and human rights as everyone else: a paradox that became central to her life and her “lawyering.” In 1967 (when gay sex was a crime and homosexuality a form of insanity), she was incarcerated in a mental asylum in Ontario for the (unnamed) affliction of “lesbianism,” a term that she had to discover through her own research. In the film she describes a road trip to San Francisco in the 196s, where she discovered her first women’s bookstore and, even more liberating, a shelf filled with lesbian books. When she entered the legal profession in 1977 she had to produce a certificate of sanity; and as her self-consciousness developed further, she understood that she herself had absorbed society’s view of her as someone evil, criminal, crazy or all three. Her field of struggle began with the rights of lesbians and gay men, and has grown to include the safety of transgendered kids in schools, gender identity on legal documents, the rights of same-sex couples to attend each other in hospitals and at deathbeds, and even at funerals; the rights of children and same-sex parents; the rights of First Nations children and their parents extends the field into the roots of our history. This is a dry list of “causes”: their reality is visceral and can be felt throughout the movie, which rises and falls with paradox, laughter and tears. I for one had never heard of the gay panic defence (still allowed in Canadian law): to hear of it (at last) is to laugh and cry at the same time. The “in particular” clause referred to in the title of the movie is from section 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms: barbara findlay’s explication of those two words demonstrates how the structures of legality select for membership in a community, a nation, and how they can equally can deselect, exclude and even eliminate. This is a brilliant and necessary film, entirely suitable to its illustrious subject. Download the movie for six bucks at iTunes, linked from: barbarafindlay.com.