Production
Raised between dining rooms and take–out counters, the children of Halifax’s Chinese restaurateurs share stories of family, hard work and identity. Through intimate conversations and personal memories, Restaurant Kids celebrates a tight-knit community whose businesses became gathering places, livelihoods and second homes for a generation growing up between cultures.
The dead are coming back to life outside the isolated Mi'kmaq reserve of Red Crow, except for its Indigenous inhabitants who are strangely immune to the zombie plague.
After being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, a young mother writes a letter to her daughter about their family’s collective journey to acceptance.
In her feature documentary Seguridad, Newfoundland-based filmmaker Tamara Segura—once named “Cuba’s youngest soldier” in a militia publicity stunt—portrays her troubled relationship with her father in the context of the Cuban Revolution. When Segura accepts a scholarship to study film in Canada, the move offers crucial distance from her alcoholic father. After four years, she returns to Cuba hoping to make amends. But her father’s sudden death just days after her arrival forces Segura to explore his troubled past and the role Cuba’s highly militarized system played in his downfall. Through a series of deeply personal on-camera interviews with her immediate family, Segura unearths long-held secrets that ultimately tell a story of resilience and profound love between family members. Seguridad artfully weaves a lifetime’s worth of still photographs into its intimate narrative, which offers a rare glimpse into the inner lives of Cubans in the post-revolutionary era.
When Jaime, a gay teenager, is sent to live in a community of Jehovah's Witnesses in small-town Quebec, she falls madly in love with a devout Witness girl. The two embark on an intense affair with consequences that will reshape the rest of their lives.
On the edge of the Arctic Ocean, the community of Taloyoak, Nunavut, is working to feed its families. Soaring grocery prices and the high cost of hunting and travel in the North leave many households facing food insecurity. Nirilaurta tells the story of a community that draws on Inuit culture, land-based knowledge and kinship to nourish their bodies, spirits and one another.
Blending documentary footage with striking visual collage, RE/ROUTE imagines two competing visions of urban life. One is ruled by cars, productivity, unchecked capitalism and individualism; the other prioritizes connection, leisure and inclusion. As familiar cityscapes morph into surreal tableaux, the film invites us to reconsider how urban design shapes our communities, our relationships, our futures.
When teenaged Fern is orphaned in the middle of a harsh Montreal winter, she is determined to avoid her mother’s tragic fate, and take care of herself. With Youth Protection nipping at her heels, she lies about her name and age, to get a job as a janitor another as a cook. Juggling life and work and the discovery of the book, ‘50 Ways to become a Millionaire: All you need to do is save,’ Fern decides to do just that, replacing her grief with the quest to become a millionaire. Written, directed and edited by award-winning filmmaker Wiebke von Carolsfeld (Marion Bridge, Stay), The Saver stars the newly discovered Imajyn Cardinal and is based on the young adult novel by Edeet Ravel.
Often feeling alone in her waking life, the young Alanis Obomsawin found friendship with the Green Horse, a benevolent being she visited regularly in her dreams. Together with other animal spirits, the Green Horse guided Alanis to realize the immensity of the gift of life and the power of kindness.
For generations, many Métis people were pressured to hide their identity and culture. Through intimate testimonies and innovative stop–motion beadwork animation, Where Our Flowers Grow follows those reclaiming connections to reveal how a culture marked by silence and erasure continues to define itself from one generation to the next.
In 1976, a Mi'gMaq teenager plots revenge against the sadistic Indian agent who imprisoned her in a residential school where rape and abuse are common.
Renowned Haida artist Bill Reid shares his thoughts on artistry, activism and his deep affection for his homeland in this heartwarming tribute from Alanis Obomsawin to her friend's life, legacy and roots.
Three South Asian delivery drivers brave Toronto’s winter dinner rush, zipping through slushy, frigid streets. Through intimate portraits of the drivers, Butter Chicken to Go exposes a deep contradiction: a country that eagerly consumes South Asian cuisine while increasingly excluding the people whose labour sustains it. What does it mean to belong when your presence is both essential and contested?
At the edge of the Yangtze River, not far from the Three Gorges Dam, young men and women take up employment on a cruise ship, where they confront rising waters and a radically changing China.
Set in a dystopic metropolitan hellscape: a spiritually exhausted and destitute Mi'gMaq man has resolved to assimilate into the ruling culture. He visits a surgical clinic - the display window littered with skin and limb samples - and undergoes a gruesome procedure to rid him of his red skin.
Gathering family, friends and community members around a beloved traditional food, pahkwêsikan sâkihitowin: Bannock is Love reflects on the role of bannock in sustaining Indigenous identity, memory and connection. Through stories shared across generationsand moving through different contexts, the film reveals how cultural traditions nourish not only the body, but also the spirit, resilience and future of a people.
Adopted Montreal filmmaker Adrian Wills discovers, on camera and in real time, the startling truths of his complex beginnings in Newfoundland. Shocking details drive Wills to the core of his birth mother’s resilience, and ultimately his own. In this moving feature documentary that combines 16mm footage and contemporary images with deeply personal conversations, Wills’ voyage transforms from an urgent search for identity into a quest to give a quiet girl her voice.
When Canada entered World War II, the National Film Board suddenly had an urgent new mission—and hundreds of women stepped forward, helping to create Canadian cinema as we now know it.
Three years in the making, this feature documentary follows the progression of the Muslim Punk scene: from its imaginary inception in a novel written by a white-convert named Michael Muhammad Knight to a full-blown, real-life scene of Muslim punk bands and their fans.
