Film Categories: Race + Ethnicity

  • Always for Pleasure

    This film is an intensive insider’s look at Mardi Gras and the myriad of musical traditions in this annual celebration in New Orleans. It provides an interesting background to black America’s honouring of the native peoples in the southern States. Dressing in elaborate Indian costumes they make specifically for the Mardi Gras, black Americans tell of the time when native communities gave them refuge from the slavery of the southern States. A film rich in its investigation of Southern music as a cultural expression of a people’s struggles.

  • Butte

    Poetic and sensual, “Butte” unfolds over the course of a day, marking the progression of time at four key points – sunrise, mid-day, late afternoon, and sundown. Filmed on the Blood Reserve in the plains and ancestral grounds of Southern Alberta, the camera instinctively accentuates dancer-choreographer Byron Chief-Moon’s deep connection to the land. The film captures images of nature and the connectiveness with the land – undulating waves of wild grass, the slow passage of clouds, pastoral, woodland thicket, and streams. The body as landscape is the central image; where the flesh, bone and muscle become synonymous with the land.

  • Dandelions

    “Lyrical and full of mirth, this filmmaker wonders out loud in her first film: ‘How do I make myself at home in a landscape made foreign to me?’ Wilkinson looks at her self – black – and ponders in the white landscape called Canada how can she ‘enjoy the flowers’ as she cartwheels with great panache through fields of them. What kind of relationship to the land can she have in a place where she sees herself but where others constantly ask: Where are you from? Wilkinson’s existence vis a vis the land seems to lie somewhere in between the…

  • Awash

    “Awash” is a song for the mortal, depicted through images of, within and around water.

  • Shelter, The

    After a tragic event that destroyed human civilization, two survivors wander around a destroyed building. The younger one, full of hope, thinks he can arrange the situation by finding other possible survivors, while the elder waits for his hour to come by making art with the debris of the late Civilization.

  • Folk Songs

    “This lyrical and impressionistic rumination on the filmmaker’s Bulgarian heritage explores the impact of family and tradition, the links between the old world and the new, and the simple, lovely gestures that unite generations.” – Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival, Toronto In 1913, Sophia and Dimitry Makedonsky were teenagers when they left the Ukraine for the United States. Growing up in the Midwest, filmmaker LeAnn Erickson often heard stories of the “old country” her grandparents had left behind. As Erickson travels to Russia, the search for her sense of “place” sparks a re-examination of her family’s immigrant past. Her…

  • Kolam (Pool)

    “‘Pool’ is a touching portrait of a community attempting to rebuild and heal itself following the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that shocked the world. The titular swimming pool is a temporary makeshift basin created to help the children of Aceh, Indonesia, face their fear of water and learn to swim again, despite the losses their community suffered when the sea came crashing in. Chong Chan Fui observes their progress with affection and a poet’s eye.” – Andrea Picard, Toronto International Film Festival In Indonesian, Acehnese and English with English subtitles. Awards: Winner of the Award for Best Canadian Short,…

  • Shadow Tracing

    A young Chinese woman challenged by identity and history, but enchanted with retro filmmaking in a digital world, makes a life decision – to purchase a vintage, hand-crank movie camera. The camera recalls images of wacky “Hollywood Chinatowns” from Hollywood films made in Colonialist times. While examining it, and dreaming of becoming a cameraman herself, she discovers the marks of former Chinese owners, and she envisions historical scenes that the camera may have seen in China. Her wishes are fulfilled as she films the streets of her own hood, in Toronto’s Asian community.

  • Echo

    “Echo” recalls childhood and the native home of the filmmaker through image, song and text. This self-portrait hints at the fragments, the pieces, the painful and repressed shards that the self contains, and through which it strives to piece together and illuminate its mysterious gaps. “‘Echo’ by Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof boldly explores homesickness and cultural yearning through visual imagery, song and text. In this atypical self-portrait, the artist has created a photogram of her body that acts as a travelling matte through the countryside of her native land as she mouths an old Polish immigrant’s song; the original recording pierces like…

  • Oh, You Pretty Things

    Told in a collage of sound and vision, “Oh you pretty things” chronicles the enchantment and disintegration of a relationship built on very different and questionable drives. Recounted through the experiences of two nameless characters in metropolitan New York, the minimal dialogue, ambient moods, engaging narration and sweeping music that make up “Oh, you pretty things” allow the observer to interpret the unique synergy of couples and the varying perception each person has to a shared situation. The ensuing emotional complexity ultimately asks the question: What is love?