Film Categories: Portraits

  • huit juillets / eight julys

    This experimental documentary explores intergenerational transmission through the story of Dolorès; almost a century of women’s history and Quebec history. Through intimate audio encounters, she invites us to relive her life in a non-chronological way, revealing her victories, her regrets, but above all the feminist roots of a woman who always wanted more than she was allowed to dream for. With a fiery character, a resilience tinged with optimism and a spirit of perpetual questioning, she offers us a retrospective on the last century marked by a quest for intellectual and financial independence. The image, for its part, is a…

  • Navels I

    Artist Robin Riad talks about her relationship with her belly button. This is the first in a series of short film profiles about navels.

  • She Measures the Earth

    She Measures the Earth follows four women scientists across Canada, a glaciologist, an ecologist, a field researcher, and a scientist dancer, as they reshape what it means to do science, teach it, and live it. Set across glaciers, forest classrooms, ice waterfalls and dance studios, it blends poetic visuals with scientific precision, and treats climate not as a crisis to be reported, but as a relationship to be felt.

  • The Goats of Monesiglio

    Observational short documentary about an Indian Punjabi family and an Italian family working side-by-side in the northern Piedmontese town of Monesiglio. Through brief observations of everyday moments, viewers gain fleeting insights into the characters’ experiences as they care for a flock of over 300 goats and produce traditional artisanal goat cheese. With hundreds of thousands of Indian agricultural labourers working in the dairy production sector of Italy (the vast majority Punjabi Sikhs), the film captures a microcosm of contemporary rural Italian life – while harkening back to a historical way of life. Themes of cultural belonging, our relationships with animals…

  • Today Is A Gift

    A harrowing and poignant portrait of 96 year-old Sally Rendall as she recounts her fortuitous survival through the Holocaust in Romania and her modest new beginnings as a Montréal immigrant. Elegantly captured through the eyes of her grandson, Today Is A Gift blends traditional documentary with imaginative hand-drawn charcoal animations.

  • Spanky’s

    Spanky’s is a queer coming of age story that pays tribute to the dancers of a small town strip club. Through the use of the artist’s personal collection of posters and water imagery a story unfolds at the intersection of sex work and queerness.

  • Burcu’s Angels

    For over 30 years, Burcu’s Angels was more than a store—it was a radical space of care. As the shop nears closure, this documentary blends archival fragments, poetic reflection, and community memory to honour a Turkish queer elder’s defiant presence—and the disappearing spaces that held generations of queer lives.

  • Auspicious

    This short documentary is a collaborative project exploring the union of two men who identify as queer and feminine in a conservative Hindu culture, where sexuality and gender roles have historically been very strict.

  • Film for Jeanette

    Film for Jeanette paints the portrait of filmmaker Brice Goldberg’s late sister, Jeanette Lee Goldberg, who died in a car accident when she was 19. What begins as a memorial becomes a celebration of her life and an exploration into the complexities of her character that led to her death. Jeanette’s story is told through interviews with family members, while the visuals, which fluctuate between abstract and representational, depict Brice’s own journey through the filmmaking process.

  • Call Tony

    Call Tony is an experimental documentation of our personal kink histories as we relate to the Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives, one another and community. Our creative process was in part shaped by the pieces of history that we did but mostly did not find at the archives. Call Tony is archival itself as it documents us as queer living kinksters exploring safety, healing, belonging and play. Working together closely on this video led to the recording of a dialogue rooted in the shared and differing identities embodied in our friendship.