Yasmine Mathurin

Witness explores the personal, political, and cultural ramifications of going viral. Directors Yasmine Mathurin, Amar Wala, and Carol Nguyen follow people who chose to document what they saw, whether in rage, fear, or amusement, and reflect on the staggering but fleeting attention that changed their lives. This series of six short episodes tells the stories that happened after the stories we heard about.

After a Haitian-born youth is racially profiled at an Indigenous basketball tournament, he wrestles with his shaken sense of belonging in his Indigenous adoptive family while attempting to heal from his past.

After Waseem Khan films a man forced to the ground and tased by Toronto Police Services, the cellphone footage goes viral. Acknowledging that he was exposed to a different reality growing up than his kids, Khan prepares for the inevitable yet daunting task of showing the video to his sons and talking through the unspeakably harsh realities of police violence.