Film Categories: Families

  • Peking Turkey

    Chris Wong takes his French-Canadian boyfriend “homo” for Christmas, despite his traditional Chinese parents’ disapproval. With the dramatics of three languages (English, French, and Chinese) swirling around the table, Pierre tries to make a bond with Chris’ parents and find the approval he wants. Audience Award for Best Short at the Sacramento Gay and Lesbian Film and Video Festival, 2009

  • All Fall Down

    “All Fall Down” is an experimental documentary that takes as its starting point a nineteenth century farmhouse in Southern Ontario, Canada, and asks the question “what has been here before?” The film weaves together a complex temporal structure that juxtaposes the lives of two figures, one historical (Nahneebahweequa: a nineteenth century aboriginal woman and land rights activist) and the other contemporary (an ex-pat drifter and father of the filmmaker’s step-daughter) across two hundred years. “All Fall Down” explores these characters through a variety of archival materials: diaries, landscape paintings, photographs, heritage films, poems, phone messages, maps, historical reenactments, songs) that…

  • Belonging

    Toronto’s diverse culture and heritage are explored through a couple’s belongings, juxtaposed with the neighborhood in which they live.

  • Golden Pin, The

    Long, a young Vietnamese-Canadian swimmer, finds himself struggling between the expectations of his family and the demands of his heart. His father wants him to marry soon, but his mother, haunted by a past romance, hopes her son will stand up for what he believes. English & Vietnamese with English subtitles Awards: Colin Campbell Award for Best Canadian Short, Toronto Inside Out Festival 2009; 2nd Place, National Film Board Award for Best Canadian Short, 2009

  • Seeing Through the Spider’s Web

    “SEEING THROUGH THE SPIDER’S WEB” weaves diverse interviews, documentary sequences, archival images, and utilizes a range of film stocks and experimental techniques in order to explore the effect of migration on family relations, faulty memories and failing eyesight.

  • End, The

  • Cutlery

    Over close – ups of cutlery in drawers and drying racks a reading of a short poem of the same title is read by the poet. In it is a lament for a past not fully recognized and a tradition that escapes the reader’s present situation…the longed for marriage groom which he will never be. Humorous and poignant at the same time, the past coincides in the present like a knife.

  • Spanish Tale, A

    The story of a family and their friend Paco who fled Spain after the Civil War and the threat of imprisonment under Franco’s regime. Told by an English voice-over of the grown daughter of the same family whose photo album we peruse as she recounts their harrowing escape to France and Montreal as a five year old child. The collision of cultures, the clash of beliefs, an idealist’s exile and how the shadow of the past interferes on subsequent events.

  • Displaced View, The

    “The Displaced View” traces a personal search for identity and pride, within the unique and suppressed history of the Japanese in Canada. Through an examination of the emotional and cultural links between the women of one family, the processes of the construction of memory and the re-construction of history are revealed. Utilizing an innovative combination of experimental, dramatic and documentary forms, the film emerges as a deeply moving and compassionate love letter. Just as the official history of the Japanese Canadians has been thrown into question, so does the film’s fictionalized narrative question doumentary as truth.

  • Trinidad

    “Trinidad” uncovers Trinidad, Colorado’s transformation from Wild West outpost to “sex-change capital of the world,” and follows three transgender women who may steer the rural ranching town toward becoming the “transsexual mecca.”