Divas Do Film presents Madonna: Truth or Dare + Recorded introduction by Sydney Urbanek

Join us for a special screening of this iconic and controversial music documentary, chronicling Madonna’s 1990 Blonde Ambition tour. Taking us from Japan to Detroit to Toronto, the all-access film gets up close with Madonna, her dancers, and then-boyfriend Warren Beatty showing the legendary pop icon and her entourage in a light that few stars would elect to be seen in today.

Writer and Madonna Scholar Sydney Urbanek will deliver a pre-recorded introduction ahead of the screening, giving context to when the film came in Madonna’s career, it’s reception on release and how the music documentary has evolved since.
 
Divas Do Film is run by Rógan Graham.

Bios

Sydney Urbanek is a Toronto writer specializing in how pop icons shape their mythos through moving images. Since 2020, she’s published the newsletter “Mononym Mythology,” writing widely-read essays about things like Tony Bennett’s MTV-aided comeback in the mid-‘90s, Madonna and David Fincher’s professional/romantic partnership a few years before that, and Beyoncé’s journey from Oscar-chasing actress to uncommonly successful musician-director. Some of her other writing has appeared in Billboard, CBC Arts, the Guardian, and the YouTube channel Be Kind Rewind. She has a Master of Arts in Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto, where she wrote her thesis on surveillance culture in director Jonas Åkerlund’s work. 

Rógan Graham is a writer and programmer from South London, with a specific interest in Black and female filmmakers. Her forthcoming BFI season, Black Debutantes (May, 2025) celebrates the early works of Black women directors. When she isn’t hosting Q&As with Mike Leigh or Pamela Anderson, she can be found on a soapbox talking about Pop Icons via her Divas Do Film screenings. Rógan was the editor of the Clio award-winning The Underground Railroad campaign book for Barry Jenkins’ series adaptation, and her own writing can be found in Little White Lies, i-D, New York Magazine’s The Cut and Polyester Zine.