Film Categories: Race + Ethnicity

  • Highway, The

    “The Highway” is about the paths in life which appear before us once we realize that we do have a choice in where our destiny lies. Glen Higgins, a young man who is trapped on his family’s decaying farm, must decide to leave after the shock caused by the death of his father.

  • Landmarks of Memory

    A tattoo ritual and hookah session memorializes a pre-war flower shop. After seeing its storefront in archival footage of the Lebanese Civil War, a first-generation daughter seeks information and connection to place. Scenes of 1976 Beirut are paired with today’s developed landscape, while roses are etched and coconut coals burn in a snowy diasporic setting.

  • FIBERS

    This 15-minute hybrid non-fiction/experimental documentary essay blends Lida Mkrtchan’s voiceover testimony about her time in bomb shelters in Shushi (Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh) with a layered audiovisual landscape. The film moves between tactile close-ups of the narrator’s hands preparing zhengyalov bread and staged studio compositions in which objects, textures and performative gestures metaphorically reimagine the narrated events and inner states through dark video tableaux. The interplay of documentary and poetic imagery illustrates the resilience of the community under siege, the rhythm of daily life and the quiet actions that sustain hope. Moments of beauty, ritual and shared labour coexist alongside stark reflections on…

  • Both, Instrument & Sound

    Both, Instrument & Sound employs tension as an aesthetic strategy, to explore solidarity, collective struggle, and the transformation of these values under neoliberalism. The film follows the life of Tony over 3 years as he describes his process of political activism from the 1970s onwards, which cannot be disentangled from his friendships and his lovers. The film’s score – co-written with musicians, the film’s cast and crew – sonically explores different interpretations of tension—both in response to Tony’s narration and to the musicians’ existing approaches to tension as a musical, cinematic, scientific, and political experience. Everyone translates, performs and remixes…

  • Monument

    Beginning in ghostly abstraction and accumulating texture by texture into a droning meditative trance, Monument deepens to a visual and sonic intensity, mixing Super 8 film with video footage to create a complicated, multilayered encounter with the tension of protest and reclamation. A vivid and energetic durational experience of collective resistance and celebration. Super 8 footage of the decaying monuments of Presidents Park (Croaker, VA) are layered with video footage captured on Monument Avenue (Richmond, VA) during the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Themes of registration and re- calibration are explored through form and content and…

  • P is for Palestine

    Language is political in this subtle short film that shows an unnamed man in Amman, Jordan repeating decontextualized political English words all include the letter P – a letter that doesn’t exist in the Arabic language and pronouncing it is coded socially and economically.

  • Don’t Take My Joy Away

    In the Shatila Palestinian camp in Lebanon, two friends, Omar and Omar, find moments of joy amid hardship until sudden violence forces them to confront loss and survival.

  • Aunt Harriet

    Aunt Harriet is a meditative moving portrait exploring introspection, healing, and aging. Set against the backdrop of rural Ontario it deepens the memory of Black lives, bridging past and present – history and myth.

  • Never Sleep

    Muna is a timid nonbinary teenager with the ability to communicate with the spirit world through her dreams. Following the sudden death of their father Ibrahim, they chooses to stop sleeping to avoid having to confront his restless spirit. When Muna’s estranged aunt Naja re-enters their life, their collective grief meets the turbulent spirits of their ancestors, and the two family members must decide whether to remain comforted by avoidance or face their fear of emotional vulnerability head on. With Naja’s guidance, Muna manages to forge a path towards rewriting her understanding of memory, loss, legacy and familial responsibility

  • Home Was Never Like This

    Step-printed images of a “home” – a suburban house, no people in sight – combine with a children’s story, told in saccarine tones, about the country mouse who discovers that “there’s no place like home.” A gently told tale of alienation.