Film Categories: Families

  • Forgotten Mother

    “Forgotten Mother” is a personal and sensitive exploration of the relationship between Alice, a black domestic worker, and Adrienne, the white child she raised. This half -hour documentary follows Adrienne’s return to her birthplace, now Zimbabwe, where she is reunited with Alice. In what was formerly white-ruled Rhodesia, it was common for black women to leave their families in rural areas to seek jobs as domestic workers in the city. These women would live on the premises of their white employers and take care of the children. Although they worked for the same family for long periods of time they…

  • Dear Grandpa

    Using my grandfather’s old eight-millimetre film camera, I explore the deteriorating relationship I had with my grandfather during his final days after being diagnosed with cancer.

  • Hatch

    After Marcy suffers a horrible miscarriage, she is plagued with daily reminders that keep her bound to her solitude. Though her mother makes valiant efforts to help her cope, her guilt outweighs her willingness to move on. One night, she discovers a strange alien egg buried in her backyard. She brings it inside, apprehensive at first, but begins to form a motherly bond with it. When the aliens return for the egg, it is trapped inside her home and can’t get out, leaving it stranded on earth. Marcy must now decide if she’s really ready to move on from her…

  • THREE BORDERS

    “Three Borders” is a found-footage film reminiscent of Chris Marker’s “La Jetée” (1962). It consists of family photos of the artist and other anonymous found (family) photos. In the style of Magic Realism, the video narrates anecdotes from the families of Alisa Berger’s Jewish father and her North Korean mother. The ten stories narrate the meeting between Koreans and Jews from Galicia. They address the overcoming or the construction of inner, outer, national, ethnic, spiritual or emotional borders which span three generations.

  • The Astronauts’ Bodies

    When his two mature children Anton and Linda start leaving the house, after graduating from school, father Michael stops taking care of his body as a protest. His son Anton takes part in a bed-rest-study to contribute to space-traveling, while his sister Linda is in search of her first sexual experience and is drawn to a suspicious young man. The film is a poetic story about the progression of dreams to go to space and about the organic beauty of the human body, its desires and longings.

  • Leagan (Peppermint Ashes)

    It has been a many years since Irina and her mother left Romania to live in Montreal. Away from their family, Irina becomes disconnected and absorbed in virtual worlds which separate her from her mother. When she is faced with the passing of a grandparent, she turns to her closest ally in an attempt to understand the meaning of loss and family through distance and time.

  • Extractions

    A personal film about Canada’s extraction industry and its detrimental effects on the land and Indigenous peoples. This film parallels resource extraction with the booming child apprehension Industry currently operating in Canada which is responsible for putting more Indigenous children into foster care than were in Residential Schools. As the filmmaker reviews his life and how these Industries have affected him, he also reflects on having his own eggs retrieved and frozen to make an Indigenous baby.

  • On the Rocks

    The filmmaker puts the spotlight on her husband, a recovering alcoholic, to learn and understand his thought process as an addict. She also reflects on her own struggles dealing with the alcoholism and its effect on their marriage.

  • Through Foreign Eyes

    The filmmaker thought of making this poetic, mosaic documentary in a bookshop, when she came across the words of poet Manoel de Barros about “the accent of the place of our origin we carry in our eyes”. She never found the quote again, but in the course of the next few years, she carried out the project with the help of other contributors, mainly the film editor. She created a film essay combining reflections on the identity and ethnic roots of several natives of the Brazilian city of Recife, who live abroad, and the images of the places where they…

  • GIK:SKWOD: How I lost My Indian Name

    In this experimental short film, a Seneca filmmaker shares how he lost his Native American “Indian” name. BACKGROUND: This is storytelling told through narration, images and text. In “Gik:skwod,” the filmmaker made cuts according to his eye blinks. During his film studies at Syracuse University, he read an excerpt from Walter Murch’s “In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing.” In the excerpt, Murch explains how we naturally edit what we see through our eye blinks. The filmmaker created “Gik:Skwod” by experimenting with Murch’s editing concept.