Film Categories: Race + Ethnicity

  • Out and About

    A Canadian road movie that gets stuck at the American border. Alerted by four men’s flamboyance, fashion sense and ethnicity, border guards interrogate the travelers. As the questioning develops, the setting becomes increasingly surreal. The room becomes a dungeon and the main characters transform themselves from simple, everyday faggots, to raging Drag Queens. The immigration officers take on the roles of Dominator and Dominatrix. In this fantastic state, the dominating duo begins to torture the foursome in order to extract “Queer Academy” confessions.

  • Zyklon Portrait

    “Zyklon Portrait” is about Zyklon B – the pesticide transformed into a genocidal weapon by the Nazis in the 1940s. It is also an elegy for the filmmaker’s grandparents. After years of silence, the filmmaker’s mother finally talks about her parents’ horrific fate. “Zyklon Portrait” is a Holocaust film without Holocaust imagery: family photographs, underwater photography and hand-painted imagery draw a personal story out of historical minutiae. “Elliptical and eerily beautiful.” – John Doyle, The Globe & Mail Awards: Grand Prize, Bilbao International Festival of Documentary and Short Film, Spain; Best Short, Best Editing and Vision TV Humanitarian Award, Hot…

  • Snailfingers

    On her immigration flight to Canada, Lailey, a young Iranian woman, encounters Snailfingers, an ancient aboriginal water-spirit. When Lailey and Snailfingers make contact, their stories become intertwined and unfold simultaneously. The drama chronicles a slice from the lives of Lailey and her sister Parvaneh, attending ESL school. Here Lailey meets Claire, the teacher’s assistant, a disillusioned lesbian of colour who represents the Sapphic voice. The secular lives of the three women are juxtaposed with Snailfingers’ spiritual existence. A poetic narrative presents glimpses of Snailfingers as she embarks on a healing quest. Several montages featuring water as the quintessential Yin element…

  • Sweet Heat

    Sixty thousand men and women of Asian ancestry served in the United States armed forces during the Vietnam War. Many fought in Vietnam as gunners, helicopter pilots and infantrymen. Some worked as nurses, journalists and other support staff. This film chronicles the stories of San Francisco-born Cole Lew and Brooklyn-born Don Lau as they experienced Vietnam.

  • Both Sides of the Wire

    A documentary which chronicles the experiences of German and Austrian refugees, the majority of whom were Jewish. They came to England to escape Nazi oppression, only to be deported and interned in Canada as “dangerous aliens” in 1940. What has become of them 50 years later?

  • Limites

    In “Limites”, Peruvian photographer Carlos Quiroz unveils the artistic process behind capturing the male nude. This documentary visits Quiroz’s private photo sessions, permitting us to witness the intimate relationship between camera and subject.

  • Sparklehorse

    With “Sparklehorse”, Gariné Torossian returns to the collage style of filmmaking explored in her earlier films, “Visions,” “Girl From Moush,” and “Drowning In Flames.” “Sparklehorse” subtly conveys, with characteristic poetry, the ways in which people communicate with and value each other in a world of spiralling meditation. The film is divided into three distinct sections: “Happy Man,” “Good Morning Spider” and “Hundreds of Sparrows.” “Happy Man” suggests a friendship conducted always at a distance – all of the images are presented using formal distancing techniques such as colour, collage and printing. At the same time the soundtrack combines a “repressed”…

  • Street Musicians & LL Cool J

    A comparison of a day in the life of two different musical artists who both appear on the same street at the same time.

  • Latin Queens: Unfinished Stories of Our Lives

    Latino drag queens fleeing persecution in South America struggle for survival in the gay community in Toronto. There is little legal protection for homosexuals in many Latin American countries. Several gays, transgendered persons, and drag queens featured in this documentary were subject to police brutality in their countries and have been granted refugee status in Canada on the basis of their sexual orientation.

  • Photographer: An Artist’s Journey, The

    A documentary exploring the provocative images of the Jamaican-Canadian visual artist Michael Chambers. Reflecting the new multi-cultural youth culture emerging in large urban centers in Canada and internationally, Chambers photographs nude models in urban and natural settings to comment on the human condition, black identity and stereotypes, self-expression, perceptions of the human body, nudity, racism, sexual orientation and AIDS prevention. The photographer follows Chambers over a five-year period in Canada and Jamaica, and shows his images of nude models taken in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, London and Paris.