Film Categories: Families

  • Yuko

    After Yuko’s death in the 2011 tsunami, her husband reflects on her absence, the nature of grief and the search for closure.

  • Night Garden

    This personal short film uses a series of telephone conversations with the filmmaker’s mother as she tries to reconcile facing cancer for a fourth time. Low-fi video filmed at night captures her mothers bond to her home, shaping the tension and isolation of living life with a terminal illness. Nocturnal lush garden imagery also evokes private reflection, and in one final moment, proposes a provocative question about time.

  • Vanilla

    Vanilla takes you through the everyday ordinary life of a disabled senior citizen living in Ottawa, Canada. It is a portrait documenting aging and the loneliness of those suffering in silence. The black and white film was shot on 16mm Bolex film camera using a KODAK 7222 Double-X Negative film. Processed by Niagara Film Lab (Toronto). Created as part of Independent Filmmakers Co-operative of Ottawa (IFCO) – Dogme Production Challenge.

  • Fresh Blood: A Consideration of Belonging

    “Fresh Blood” is a hybrid documentary blending personal narrative and a video-essay style. The piece engages issues of Jewish racialized identity, Arab/Jewish dichotomies and the ways these come together in Iraqi Jewish culture, and the personal implications of the politics of Palestine and of the Jewish holocaust. The artist returns to a land of remembering and forgetting. With her first language lost it is difficult to communicate with her grandmother, and yet there is humour and poignancy in their resulting exchanges. In seeking out her biological father, Yael questions the significance of blood relations. She revisits and revises family memory…

  • God Straightens Legs

    Filmmaker Joële Walinga documents a moment of faith and waiting in the life of her Christian mother, a French-Canadian living in the Bible Belt who has opted to forgo cancer treatment.

  • The Ritual of the Sex Magick Warriors

    The Sex Magick Warriors are organizing, they reveal themselves to the city and risk it all to carry out an obscure objective. The colors pink and teal are the embodiment of Magick, Art and Sexuality and their use by the warriors -through empathy, telepathy and tactile care- spills the tea on their means for survival in these harsh urban environments. The ritual exposes the hardships of this army of lovers and reveals their sensual strategy for self preservation.

  • Knowing

    We are always seized with the exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: we know what we do not know.

  • wish

    Against the background of the Canadian prairies and the coast of Eastern Canada, wish explores Korean monosyllabic words. While counting to three in Korean, the video explores the multiple meaning of single-syllabic words from one to three that also signify work, labour, profit, etc. Using an observational lens, I documented my retired parents on a trip to the East Coast of Canada. In this video, I explore Canadian landscapes from a diasporic point of view revealing how new narratives emerge when immigrants engage with the Canadian landscape. wish is dedicated to my parents who contributed to the economic fabric of…

  • Waiting (انتظار)

    A young woman journeys to visit her grandmother. What transpires between the unsaid and silence propels into a prolonged moment of tension and desires of connection. Image description: A young woman and her grandmother sit next to each other on a couch. They both look straight ahead with stony-faced expressions, not talking.

  • Una Sola Sangre

    “I have two homelands, but one blood,” says Silvia Galdes in Una Sola Sangre, the latest film by the Haitian-born, Toronto-based filmmaker Esery Mondesir. Silvia, along with her siblings Silverio and Estella, is a first-generation Haitian-Cuban, the daughter of Sylvain Galdes, one of an estimated 500.000 Haitians who migrated to Cuba for work in the early 20th century. Despite not seeing their father’s homeland until their sixth decades (and after the shooting of the film), the Galdes family and their social position in Cuba has long been marked by their Haitianness – an identity they and their children negotiate in…