Alicia Smith

Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying is a short meditation on love, grief, and imagination. The hand-drawn animated documentary was created through a collaboration between mother, elder and narrator Edith Almadi and filmmakers Natalie Baird and Toby Gillies. This poetic piece celebrates life and the transformative ability of art to elevate and transcend us. Through vivid drawings and Edith’s simple yet magical words, the film explores our enduring bond with loved ones who have passed. In honouring her son’s life within the cosmos, Edith’s artworks embody colours, shapes and metaphors that remind us of the timeless power of love, gravity, and grace until our final breaths.

Thursday shot from filmmaker Galen Johnson's high-rise apartment during COVID-19 “lockdown” in Winnipeg, captures people going about their daily routines in the city's eerily empty streets, yards and parking lots, on their balconies and on the riverbanks. The extreme distance and the diminutive scale of humans is paired with sound close-ups—a combination that embodies the strange, heightened intensity of feeling of the time, knowing an era-defining tragedy is happening yet being so physically removed.

Moving between earth and stars, past and present, this hybrid feature documentary follows the extraordinary life of Wilfred Buck, a charismatic and irreverent Indigenous Elder who overcame a harrowing history of displacement, racism, and addiction by reclaiming ancestral star knowledge and ceremony.

The Lake Winnipeg Project is a four-part documentary series that calls attention to stories of ingenuity and resilience in four diverse communities surrounding Lake Winnipeg, at a time when many external forces are imposing change.

Shoal Lake 40 women talk about their struggles, and those of their parents and grandparents, in trying to raise their families in a hazardous state of enforced isolation. Everyone in the community has a harrowing story of a loved one falling through the ice while trying to get across the lake, with pregnant women and new mothers fearing for their babies and having no choice but to make the trek in dangerous conditions. The film shows the key role of the community’s women in demanding funding for the road from three levels of government, and how their reconnection to culture and ceremony give them the strength to keep going.

Meet Annie, a woman who, despite being caught up in the circus of everyday life, finds her balance. Using live-action footage and traditional animation, filmmaker Anita Lebeau takes us on a whirlwind tour through Annie’s busy world and shows us the power that lies in the small choices we make every day.

Join a grassroots collective of volunteers as they search Winnipeg’s Red River and its banks for clues to find out what happened to their missing family and friends. The documentary demonstrates the devastating experience of searching for a loved one who didn't come home with profundity and humanity.

Depicts Inuit creation stories in all their glory. Arctic Song tells stories of how the land, sea and sky came to be in beautifully rendered animation. Telling traditional Inuit tales from the Iglulik region of Nunavut through song, the film revitalizes ancient knowledge and shares it with future generations.

By inviting viewers to take a closer look at the birds that serve as one of this country’s hardiest symbols, Karsten Wall’s stunning documentary invites a deeper consideration of the conditions we humans have created for them.

The first of a five-part series of short documentaries: This story begins over a century ago, when the City of Winnipeg decides that the water surrounding the traditional Anishinaabe territory of what is now Shoal Lake 40 First Nation will be diverted and used as Winnipeg’s primary water source. The community, their ancient burial grounds, environment, and ways of life are forever disrupted, and access to opportunities and essential services are severed. Enforced residential schooling and a tainted water supply compound the devastating impact. Community leader and former combat engineer Daryl Redsky sheds light on how generations of complex planning, cultural preservation and mobilization have led us to the current moment—and to the construction of Freedom Road.

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.

Documentary about filmmaker Bonnie Ammaaq's memories of life on Baffin Island, where her family moved for eleven years during her childhood from the hamlet of Igloolik to return to the traditional Inuit way of life.

A little girl plays with her toys, blissfully unaware that she may hold the future of humanity in her hands. Good Luck to You All blends innocence, hope and panic, exploring AI’s unanswered questions with whimsy and unease.

As the global pandemic reaches into the Arctic Archipelago, Inuk filmmaker Carol Kunnuk documents how unfamiliar new protocols affect her family and community. Her vividly specific soundtrack juxtaposes snippets from local radio broadcasts, issuing health advisories in both Inuktitut and English, with the sweet sounds of children at play. A richly detailed and tender account of disruption and adjustment.

This film shares the story of Camp Morningstar, a sacred camp established on the east side of Lake Winnipeg that was erected in response to the proposal of a silica sand mine project.