Film Categories: Identity

  • A Parent’s Wishlist

    A short film about upward mobility and working class aspirations, A Parent’s Wishlist focuses on something that could be found in many North American homes between the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – a set of encyclopedias. Dragged from one city to another and across the country by my Chilean father, his Encyclopedia Britannica set came to symbolise his hope for a better life for both himself, and for me.

  • The Places We Lived

    The Places We Lived uses a large family archive of Super8 and digital home movies from the mid-1970s to late 1990s to grapple with the hopes, dreams, and disappointments of two South American immigrants who moved to Montreal in the wake of the excitement and optimism generated by Expo ’67. This story focuses on the father, Jose (“Pepe”), whose life in Canada followed four hardscrabble decades in Chile. A story about childhood and fatherhood, aging, capitalism, and obsolescence, The Places We Lived opens up new questions about class, memory, diasporic narratives, and the complicated histories of migration and exile.

  • HOW YOU SEE ME

    Drawn from lived experiences and memories, HOW YOU SEE ME tells the story of a Chinese girl navigating her thoughts on white beauty standards. She seeks to understand her relationship to them, and express the damaging effects and harm that fetishizing Asian women causes.

  • K-SARAM I: Tale of the pig head

    Centered around the Koryo-saram community in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, the film displays a shamanistic memorial ancestral ritual „Jesa”, encompassing the collective memory of Korean diaspora, the wish of the Koryo-saram for a unification of South and North Korea, and showing the real appearance of the ghosts of migrants whose transformation to spirits was not succeeded. “Saram” means human in Korean. The title refers to the today very popular K-export- products like K-Drama, K-Pop, K-Beauty, etc. and to the name that the Soviet-Korean diaspora uses instead of the South-Korean term “Koryo-In”. Approximately 500,000 ethnic Koreans reside in the former Soviet Union. Most…

  • Pur Laine

    PUR LAINE is a story about Ruby, a filipina, married to Roy, a Quebecois man, who dies and leaves her penniless. Ruby struggles with Roy’s drug addict daughter, Marie Claire, over who gets to sell Roy’s house, which also happens to be Marie Claire’s childhood home. A dramedy of errors, their collision reveals what they really want on the inside.

  • Toe the Line

    TOE THE LINE follows Gloria Chau, a closeted teenage hockey player. When she’s not on the ice, she’s got a guitar in her hands and a snapback on her head. Her mother Nancy, a stylish Hong Kong woman, spends sleepless nights worrying about Gloria’s failing grades. Gloria is torn between two worlds: the fun but cutthroat world of hockey where she gets to be loud and proud in her queerness, and the one at home where she’s a recluse, using music to cope with being forced into becoming someone she’s not. Underlying these tensions is a deep racial divide. She…

  • Contents under Pressure

    An anxious young party-goer finds love at a party, but after committing a party faux pas, is destroyed in a washing machine accident. From here, the project pivots, self-conscious and needing to recast its hero, who quickly has an existential crisis (“what’s my motivation?”). A poetic, quirky, singular meditation on identity and personal history, populated with the beautiful vistas of Atlantic Canada.

  • Manifestarsi

    The film investigates within the microscopic dimension the material component of billboards posted in Milan. The author, through a peculiar perspective – achieved with a unique optic – goes beyond the limits of vision, inviting us to fall into the alienating but enveloping physical structure beyond the mythical surface of the images. The cinematic result is an atmosphere that is not abstract but informal. Where the material reflects a visual condition devoid of perspective references on which to base metaphysical foundations: here the process suspends the essence.

  • Ever Wanting (for Margaret Chung)

    Inspired by San Francisco’s first Chinese American female physician, this film envisions the euphoria and despair of Margaret Chung and her insatiable desire for women and celebrity through her forays into drugs, sapphic surgeries, and queer flights of fancy. Image description: A black-and-white archival image toned warm purple, showing a woman dancing with arms raised to the side and skirt flared out in a circle.

  • Queering Yoga

    Queering Yoga tells the story of 6 Queer/Trans/QTPOC yoga teachers and their personal stories of healing, transformation, and yoga journey. Themes explored include: What is the intersection of Queer, Trans, and QTPOC identities and yoga? What does empowered and embodied visibility look like for the Queer, Trans, and QTPOC communities? What does it mean to decolonize one’s yoga practice and why is this important? Queering Yoga embraces an intersectional lens to explore identity, personal, and community transformation. The film positions Queer/Trans/QTPOC yoga teachers as important voices and leaders in current day yoga conversations and spaces committed to ending racism, homophobia,…