Production
Living in downtown Toronto to attend school, Lina Li returns to the comfort of home in Thornhill and her mother's cooking. In this candid short, filmmaker Lina Li and her mother engage in an intimate conversation about immigration to Canada, misunderstandings, barriers to communicating, love and the taste of home.
Taking Charge shows teens taking the initiative to overcome the fears and vulnerabilities of growing up in an increasingly violent and rapidly changing society. Through role-playing, theatre groups, peer discussion groups and anti-violence collectives these young activists have "taken charge," educating themselves and their peers towards a deeper understanding of the effects of violence rooted in sexism, racism and homophobia.
As a child in Vietnam, Thao’s mother often rescued ants from bowls of sugar water. Years later they would return the favour. Boat People is an animated documentary that uses a striking metaphor to trace one family’s flight across the turbulent waters of history.
Ten women in Canada talk about being lesbian in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s: discovering the pulp fiction of the day about women in love, their own first affairs, the pain of breaking up, frequenting gay bars, facing police raids, men's responses, and the etiquette of butch and femme roles. Interspersed among the interviews and archival footage are four dramatized chapters from a pulp novel, "Forbidden Love".
When her mother decides to sell their house, decolonial writer Julietta Singh returns to her childhood home on the Assiniboine River to say goodbye. As Singh listens to the stories embedded in its walls, the house reveals 140 years of overlooked histories—Japanese, Deaf, Métis, Indigenous, and Irish women whose lives, like Singh’s, were shaped by resistance and care. In this genre-defying, cross-community film, the home becomes more than a personal archive, transforming into a site of radical feminist possibility.
A busload of women become stranded in an isolated part of the Canadian countryside. As they await rescue, they reflect on their lives through a mostly ad-libbed script.
Sculpting Memory places Atom Egoyan in an audiovisual environment woven from the fabric of his own films―a conceptual move that references Egoyan’s adaptation of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape while evoking Egoyan’s own work as a moving-image installation artist and his concern with the recording and displaying of images.
Based on the bestselling book, this urgent feature documentary from celebrated director Michelle Latimer will take viewers on a journey into the mind of one of the world’s foremost Indigenous intellectuals, and one of our greatest storytellers: Thomas King.
No description available.
Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story reveals the extraordinary rise, sudden disappearance, and resurgence of trailblazing Black trans soul singer Jackie Shane.
Raised in a refugee camp in the West Bank while her mother was in prison, Walaa dreams of being a policewoman, wearing a uniform, avoiding marriage, and earning a salary. Despite discouragement from her family, Walaa applies - and gets in. But her own rebellious behavior and a complicated relationship with her mother are a challenge, as are the circumstances under which she lives. Following Walaa from 15 to 21, this first-ever look inside the Palestinian police academy brings us the story of a young woman navigating formidable obstacles, learning which rules to break and follow, and disproving the negative predictions from her surroundings and the world at large.
Filmmaker and bestselling author Vivek Shraya’s ode to a popular Edmonton gay bar that closed in 2007. With pulsating neon-light animation, Reviving the Roost is a story about community complexity and longing, and an elegy to a lost space.
What gets lost when female voices are stymied during the creative process? Pairing intimate interviews with absurdist re-enactments, Joyce Wong crafts a tartly subversive look at patriarchy and racism in the film industry.
When a vintage bassinet appears at filmmaker Tiffany Hsiung and long-time fiancée Victoria Mata’s home, it sets off a chain reaction of emotions. "The Bassinet" is a gentle and affecting story about Tiffany’s personal struggle with the intersection of her sexual orientation and cultural identity, and the cross-generational burden of having a baby in the context of rigid social constructs of marriage and family.
In this emotional, sweeping tale of healing and forgiveness, powerhouse Jamaican American poet and LGBTQ+ activist Staceyann Chin embarks on an international journey to re-imagine the art of mothering—having been abandoned by her own mother as a young child.
Revisit the pivotal moments and courageous actions that ignited Canada’s 2SLGBTQ+ movement. From early struggles to landmark victories, this powerful reminder of how quickly rights can be taken away highlights the ongoing fight for justice and equality.
Meet Smack Daddy, Suzy Hotrod, Kamikaze Kitten, and the other badass warriors leading the Roller Derby Revolution. Derby Crazy Love chronicles not only the birth and evolution of modern Flat Track Roller Derby, but also shows the people who are changing how we look at women in sport and femininity, one booty block at a time.
A fishing wharf serves as the runway for a sexy, male fashion show, and childhood fantasies are brought to life in this nostalgic and surreal video about growing up gay in a small Newfoundland town. Auto Biography is a world where lesbian mothers dote over their gay sons and old men reminisce about long-ago boyfriends. In Day's humourous inversion of societal values (shot clandestinely in his parent's house), memory is colourfully reconstructed, and dinner dates and pyjama parties take on a whole new meaning.
This entertaining examination of three gay male/straight female relationships offers an illuminating look at fag hag stereotypes and the efforts by groups like SWISH (Straight Women in Support of Homos) to embrace the term.
Coming To Voice is a dynamic, visually stylistic documentary exploring the emergence of Black film and video makers in Canada. Featuring Black filmmakers from Atlantic to Pacific Canada , we experience the journey taken by director Clement Virgo and his producers Karen King and Damon D'Oliveira in the making of the feature film RUDE. A journey that takes us behind-the-scenes from financing the feature, through production, to the world premiere at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), RUDE'S theatrical release and the aftermath.
