Discover Movies

Why are we still able, today, to view images that were captured over 125 years ago? As we enter the digital age, audiovisual heritage seems to be a sure and obvious fact. However, much of cinema and our filmed history has been lost forever. Archivists, technicians and filmmakers from different parts of the world explain what audiovisual preservation is and why it is necessary. The documentary is a tribute to all these professionals and their important work.

Filmmaker Marc Fafard examines the historical and cultural significance of the seafaring Vikings.

Vladimir Putin reemerges after eight years as President and another four years as Prime Minister of The Federation of Russia

One man's hat is another man's treasure when it comes to the importance and significance of saving items of historic value.

The life and work of German political philosopher of Jewish descent Hannah Arendt (1906-75), who caused a stir when she coined a subversive concept, the banality of evil, in her 1963 book on the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann (1906-62), held in Israel in 1961, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine.

Italian navigator and explorer John Cabot discovers the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and runs "aground" on a bounty of fish.

Sports coach James Naismith's invention of Basketball is tested by a group of young students in Springfield Illinois.

Toronto cartoonist Joe Shuster describes the comic book hero he created.

A riveting political thriller starring Shawn Doyle (John A. Macdonald), Peter Outerbridge (George Brown) and David LaHaye (George-Etienne Cartier) and set during the struggles that take Canada from colony to country.

Subjects of Desire is a thought provoking film that examines the cultural shift in beauty standards towards embracing (or appropriating) Black aesthetics and features, deconstructing what we understand about race and the power behind beauty.

During the decline of the fur trade, a mercenary struggles to unite the survivors of a famine-stricken outpost plagued by a dark force that leaves its victims with an insatiable hunger.

Set in 1815, this is the dramatic story of a child of the fur trade, son of a Native mother and a Scottish-Canadian fur trader. John Mackenzie's father is a wintering partner of the Montréal-based North West Company, which was for decades the wealthiest merchant enterprise in North America. To mark his entry into adulthood, twelve-year-old John is travelling for the first time to Fort William, the Company's lavish winter headquarters by Lake Superior. In following his journey, the film reveals the complex network of people--Scottish, French and Native Canadian--that made up fur-trading society and gave a unique flavor to the opening up of Canada's northwest.

When researchers began looking into just how much the Soviet government knew about UFOs and extraterrestrial visitation, they were not surprised to learn that the Russians took the subject very seriously. What they didn't expect was evidence of ancient alien visitation, paranormal properties associated with related artifacts, and most shocking of all, of a mass abduction in 1985!

1824 - Veteran fur trader Francois Leclair is held responsible when his important female passenger does not arrive at her York Factory destination.

The unbelievable true story of Chelly Wilson, who escaped the Holocaust and built a porn cinema empire in New York City in the 1970s. Chelly was a Greek-born, Christmas-celebrating, Jewish grandma, who married men but was openly gay. This documentary charts her unlikely rise to wealth as a shrewd businesswoman on “The Deuce,” aka New York’s infamous 42nd Street.

Matthew Czerny was a film production student in Concordia University’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema in the early 1990s and did a documentary about his grandmother as his major first-year assignment. It was highly regarded by the film school; they scheduled it as the final showing in the annual best-of-the-year film night.

A Canadian soldier's bear becomes the object of adoration and inspiration for a young boy and his father, A.A. Milne.

Cook and Peary: The Race to the Pole is an unabashedly biased recreation of the controversy concerning the "conquering" of the North Pole. Robert E. Peary (Rod Steiger), a US Navy commander and shameless self-promoter, sets out through Arctic wastes in 1909 to discover the Pole, an expedition that many others have attempted but failed to complete. His principal rival is Dr. Frederick A. Cook (Richard Chamberlain), who insists that he'd already reached the Pole in 1908. Though the experts (and the US Congress) conclude that Perry was first, public opinion is firmly in Cook's corner--as is this TV movie.

A film about fireworks, the people who make them and the cultures behind them across the globe.

In 1922 the first documentary in the genre sense came on the big screen, "Nanook of the North" (1922). Kabloonak is the story of the making of this movie for which the story was partially staged by his director 'Robert Flaherty'.

A historical recreation of the experience of Canadian soldiers in World War One, with a cast of descendants of the people who participated in it.

During the rise of the music video era in the 80s, Canada launched "MuchMusic", a low budget TV network that revolutionized how the world's biggest stars connected with their fans and influenced the culture for the next three decades.

Lawyer and politician Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine build inter-lingual cooperation.

Using reenactment, journal readings, and speculation, Oliver Husain's multilayered video vibrantly evokes the Indian performer and activist Snehalata Reddy, who was incarcerated in the Bangalore Central Jail in 1976 with no hearing, no charges filed, and no recourse to a court of law during the state of emergency declared by Indira Gandhi.

Computer-generated imagery and other visualization techniques reveal how it would look if all the water was removed from RMS Titanic's final resting place.

This short biopic profiles Montreal lawyer-turned-politician George-Étienne Cartier as he campaigns to unite English and French Canada under Confederation. The political world of a century ago comes to life as we hear debates in the Parliament of Upper and Lower Canada amidst political strife and personal feuds. Ultimately, Cartier skilfully allays the fears of party and sectional leaders, convincing them that federal union would protect, rather than weaken, Quebec’s cherished rights of language and religion. The eloquent and enigmatic Cartier was instrumental in shaping the Canada that was soon to emerge.

Lyddie faces a daunting task: She's struggling to reunite her family and save their farm. To do that, she takes a job at a cotton mill and, with the help of Diana (who's toiled in the mills since age 10), learns that there are risks involved with being a factory girl -- namely, dangerous working conditions and low wages. Soon, Lyddie finds herself in the forefront of a suffrage movement to better those appalling conditions.

Scott and Brandon meet at an orphanage in the 1980s. When Brandon sets off for California, Scott follows close behind. Their story lives in the margins of an adult magazine.

Filmed on the great Mackenzie River, this short fiction film recreates the amazing voyage of the man who gave his name to it. Following the path outlined in Mackenzie's journal, the film depicts his arduous journey by canoe all the way to the salt water of the Arctic Ocean - one of the great epics of northern exploration.

Director Michèle Stephenson’s new documentary follows families of those affected by the 2013 legislation stripping citizenship from Dominicans of Haitian descent, uncovering the complex history and present-day politics of Haiti and the Dominican Republic through the grassroots electoral campaign of a young attorney named Rosa Iris.

Follows the crew of a Canadian submarine in World War Two and their fight against the Japanese Imperial Navy.

Over the course of a year, film follows Vancouver Pride Society president Ken Coolen to various international Pride events, including Poland, Hungary, Russia, Sri Lanka and others where there is great opposition to pride parades. In North America, Pride is complicated by commercialization and a sense that the festivals are turning away from their political roots toward tourism, party promotion and entertainment. Christie documents the ways larger, more mainstream Pride events have supported the global Pride movement and how human rights components are being added to more established events. In the New York sequence, leaders organize an alternative Pride parade, the Drag March, set up to protest the corporatization of New York Pride. A parade in São Paulo, the world's largest Pride festival, itself includes a completely empty float, meant to symbolize all those lost to HIV and to anti-gay violence.

The Untold Story of the Suffragists of Newfoundland (1999) is a docu-drama celebrating the thirty year struggle by the women of Newfoundland to win the right to vote.

Major-General Arthur Currie discusses the plan of attack on Vimy Ridge with General Julian Byng.

In March 2002, a state TV signal in China gets hacked by members of the banned spiritual group Falun Gong. Their goal is to counter the government narrative about their practice. In the aftermath, police raids sweep Changchun City, and comic book illustrator Daxiong (Justice League, Star Wars), a Falun Gong practitioner, is forced to flee. He arrives in North America, blaming the hijacking for worsening an already violent repression. But his views are challenged when he meets the lone surviving participant to have escaped China, now living in Seoul, South Korea.

A Blustery winter's night - a warm trapper's cabin up ahead. The dark, cold woods might prove safer lodging. A true story from Cow Head Newfoundland 1809.

In the heart of a metropolitan city of 15 million people and among the construction of a new billion-dollar transportation network, an archaeological sensation has been discovered: the ancient harbour of Theodosious, lost from the history books for over 1000 years.

The bombing of the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, by a nation he knew only by name, thrust nine-year-old Minoru Fukushima into a world of racism so malevolent he would be forced to leave Canada, the land of his birth. Like thousands of other Japanese Canadians, Minoru and his family were branded as an enemy of Canada, dispatched to internment camps in the interior of British Columbia, and finally deported to Japan. Directed by Michael Fukushima, Minoru's son, the film artfully combines classical animation with archival material. The memories of the father are interspersed with the voice of the son, weaving a tale of suffering and survival, of a birthright lost and recovered.

A laid-up polyamorous bicycle courier discovers that her older, scholarly boyfriend has been keeping a sinister secret in his closet.

Filmed in IMAX, a young Mayan boy who lives close to the ruins becomes acquainted with an archaeologist (Guerra) and asks her to tell him about his ancestors. The crew travelled to over 15 locations in Mexico and Guatemala, including Tulum and Chichén Itzá.

L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland is settled by Norsemen (Vikings) around the year 1000 CE.

20 Moves is the story of how the best-selling puzzle toy came to market and the impact it had on the world around it. Tom Kremer stumbled upon an unwanted, unpatented puzzle game at the Nuremberg Toy Fair in 1979. It had been invented in Hungary in 1974 by Professor Erno Rubik who used it as a pedagogical aid for his architecture students and would go on to be played with by 1/5th of the world's population. We explore the cube's story - from its creation behind the Iron Curtain to the role it played in the fall of communism and the creation of free market trading in the former communist nations. We show how the cube was brought to the west - how it was introduced and marketed and what caused it to be the biggest fad of the 1980's. The cube would go on to symbolize an entire generation like nothing before it. The many faces, layers, and sides of 20 Moves is exactly like the cube. With each act our audience discovers another twist, another turn, another solve in the history of the Cube.

For more than forty years, British journalist Robert Fisk has reported on some of the most violent conflicts in the world, from Northern Ireland to the Middle East, always with his feet on the ground and a notebook in hand, travelling into landscapes devastated by war, ferreting out the facts and sending reports to the media he works for with the ambition of catching the interest of an audience of millions.

An exploration into the nature of stupidity in Western society and its history of our perception of it.

Two thousand Canadians suffered the longest incarceration anywhere in the Second World War, a bitter four-year period inside Japanese POW camps in Hong Kong and Japan.

In an oil-scarce world, we know there are sacrifices to be made in the pursuit of energy. What no one expected was that a tiny Native community, living down the river from Canada's tar sands, would reach out to the world for help — and be heard.

This experimental opera reenacts the lesser known history of Chinese medical student Li Shiu Tong, and his lover Magnus Hirschfeld, a much older German sexologist and gay rights pioneer during Nazi Germany.

Lawyer, judge, and politician John Matheson looks at candidates for Canada's new flag.

Detective Murdoch fights against a family of great influence to solve the murder of abortionist Dolly Capshaw.

Cory Mann is a quirky Tlingit businessman hustling to earn a living in Juneau, Alaska. He gets hungry for smoked salmon, nostalgic for his childhood and decides to spend a summer smoking fish at his family's traditional fish camp. The unusual story of his life and the untold history of his people interweave with the process of preparing traditional food as he struggles to pay his bills, keep the IRS off his back, and keep his business afloat. By turns tragic, bizarre, or just plain ridiculous, Smokin' Fish tells the story of one man's attempt to navigate the messy zone of collision between the modern world and an ancient culture.

a short, narrative biopic that tells the story of Guion Bluford, as he grapples with the reality that he is to become the first African American man in space.

Montreal, spring 1966. Jean Corbo, 16 years old, born to a Quebec mother and an Italian father, is torn between his two affiliations. After befriending two young far-left activists, he joined the Front de Libération du Québec, an underground radical group. Jean, from then on, marches inexorably towards his destiny.

Set against the backdrop of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1960's, 'Examination of Conscience' follows two brothers of questionable morals. This snapshot of their lives shows how they and their peers cope with the pressures of their time.

A film that documents the solar eclipse that happened in Montreal on April 8th 2024.

In the summer of 1969, Bernard, a Gaspesian fisherman's son, arrive in Perce to fin work. He meets Paul, Jacques and Francis, Quebec Independence activists who have come to open the 'Fisherman's House'. They aim to organize public conferences and offer lodgings to young travelers. A motley crowd of Quebecers from all over the province soon flocks to Perce: artists, hippies, rockers, hitchhikers and the like shake local authorities. Bernard is won over by the trio's ideas and gets increasingly involved in their project. The following year, the will join the Front de liberation du Quebec (FLQ) and play a pivotal role in the Summer Crisis 1969.

In Nazi-occupied Prague, a former soldier and his partner live a quiet life in hiding. When a former colleague draws them into a bold plot to assassinate a Senior SS leader, they must choose between their fragile peace and their country.

A look into the history and tradition of Queen's Football in it's golden era, featuring never before seen footage of the university in the 1960s.

New France, under the leadership of French governor Louis de Buade de Frontenac, repels the British invasion at the Battle of Quebec