Film Categories: Race + Ethnicity

  • Walnut Tree, The

    As a follow-up to the award-winning “Zyklon Portrait,” “The Walnut Tree” offers a striking combination of documentary and experimental approaches to examine Holocaust memory, the family, and the role of photography in history. Three girls in Dutch costumes stand posing for their father. This fleeting moment, made static in a photograph, is contrasted with the moving imagery of railway tracks – tracks that carried the death transports – now blurred with memory and time. In a matter-of-fact tone, Schogt’s mother describes how her parents tore several pictures out of the family albums when they fled the Nazis in 1943. The…

  • Urge

    A young woman has to pee. Due to various circumstances and her own inability to admit it, she holds it in. When the need becomes too unbearable, she takes matters into her own hands – with unexpected results.

  • Over a Small Cup of Coffee

    The poetic story of a young man’s struggle to pursue his life’s calling. Damiano is a young Italian American who, in the 1950s, works in his father’s cafe and longs to fulfill his dream of becoming an accomplished actor. By eavesdropping on the various amusing conversations of a diverse spectrum of characters who frequent the cafe, Damiano gains a unique insight on life – he learns that most people in society give up on their dreams by choosing to settle for what is easiest. His experiences in the cafe, along with the ongoing resistance Damiano faces from his father, eventually…

  • Tracing Soul

    “Tracing Soul” is a poetic bodyscape where the sacred, sensual, primordial and profane female form imagines and evokes the possibilities of the soul through the coalescing of the fragments, intimate gestures, oblique angles, disintegrating lines and shadows, music and text enveloping the bodily compositions. Also available on the DVD compilation “Artist Spotlight Series: Michelle Mohabeer.”

  • Petals

    In 1999 the newspapers in Kerala South India broke a shocking tale of two young lesbian girls who ended their lives beneath a train. A note they carried stated that they were ending their lives because they had failed in their long struggle to live together in the harsh and hypocritical society of Kerela. It is an irony that Kerela is 100 per cent literate and one of the most literate places in the world. This film picks up on the agony of those innocent girls and many others who still struggle for their emotional rights.

  • Brighter Moon, A

    “A Brighter Moon” is the story of Mikey and Valentine, two students from Hong Kong who have come to Toronto to study English at a “visa school.” Mikey and Valentine find themselves in a strange land where they must struggle to survive in a world without parents. The film attempts to show the foreign students in a sympathetic light, pointing to some of the problems they face in Canada. The title refers to an Asian proverb that translated roughly means, “The moon shines brighter in a foreign country.” “A Brighter Moon” was filmed entirely in Toronto’s Dundas Street Chinatown and…

  • Death to Everyone

    “Using the drawings of Bruno Schulz, who must be numbered among the great writers of the 20th century for his two slim books of short stories, Torossian builds up a disturbing imagescape of sexual malice and voyeurism. Torossian’s films are characterized as much by her reuse of other artists’ work as they are by her trademark collage techniques.” – Chris Gehman, Images Festival of Independent Film & Video, 2001

  • Let Me Start by Saying

    A gay man has fallen in love with a woman; she has gone away, and the image of her face haunts him. Desperately, he tries to come up with a way to be close to her again.

  • Songs of Youth

    A photograph from the past triggers filmmaker Konstatnin Selezen’s journey into the maze of half-forgotten memories, and prompts him to leave for his ex-homeland in search of things past. The voyage takes an unexpected turn when he accidentally meets Kostia, a victim of the post-perestroika chaos in the present-day Ukraine, who supports his blind wife and two children ( who he hopes will become famous movie stars) on small change that he earns by playing on city squares. “Songs of Youth” takes us onto Kostia’s routes to earning his daily bread, from his humble home in the village somewhat ironically…

  • Air Cuts, The

    In Mandarin. Shot against the landscape of social and economic changes in Beijing – the destruction of aged houses and the construction of new pillars of skyscrapers – the film collects a string of small events which show human behaviour and its interaction with the surrounding environment that is diffused with an irritating air of crawling anxiety and sexuality. While the events are mostly unrealistic and often unrelated, at the centre of theme is a middle-class couple who are going through an uncomfortable relationship. They wonder if the quality of their relationship is due to the mal-positioning of their bed,…