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"Art makes the familiar strange so that it can be freshly perceived. To do this it presents its material in unexpected, even outlandish ways: the shock of the new." - Viktor Shklovsky ***** This short hybrid film departs from the remediation of a low resolution .jpg file. A poor image to bring attention to a poor moment in cinema history.

"The Complete Book of Roses"—pages 1–114. A brief glimpse of the disconnect between digital devices and recording the "natural." Made during Video Pool’s Media Arts Residency (2019–2021) using the Apollo monitor and microscope camera.

"At the New Year's Eve event of the 'Crossover' International Performance Art Festival, Canadian performance artist John G. Boehme appeared very calmly. He wore a black face mask and stared at the audience (camera) like a still life object in front of the screen, then he began to swallow the mask." – Cai Qing

Communication is a reality of the 21st Century, even for the most isolated people. Remote tribes around the world struggle to adapt to the intrusions of the Western civilization. This film brings forward tribes scattered on 5 continents: the San of the Kalahari Desert, the native tribes from the Amazonian forest, the Inuit from the Arctic polar circle, the Pygmies of the Congo rain forest, the indigenous of the Vanuatu archipelago and the Hmong tribes from Northern Vietnam. Their contact with the white civilization throughout history followed the way of violence and the way of abandonment. 16 years ago, someone found another way: A Third Way to reach tribes. This is the story of a new approach and communication between civilizations.

A conversation with Toronto community activist and female-to-male transsexual Peter Dunnigan. He speaks openly about addiction, recovery, sexuality, and life as a gender outcast. More than an educational tool for a general audience, this video is a call for transsexuals, both female-to-males and male-to-females, to unite, heal, and resist.

A documentary exploring the ways in which three people - a news anchor, a playwright, and a graphic designer - use their different mediums to talk about suicide.

A miniature wrecking ball and accompanying mini brick wall to be destroyed; an incomplete puzzle of the Parthenon; homemade fake latex vomit containing plastic novelties, pieces of candy, knick knacks, and detritus from the artist’s studio; pennants made from packets and designer ziplock bags; and a mesh veil adorned with chewing gums. —Western Front

A virtual prisoner of the winter snows that block its roads, the village of St.Hilarion, to justify its name, revels in the joys of the jig and the "turlutte", the lilting songs that tell the humorous tale, ever new and yet essentially always the same, about the sorry fate of the one who gives into temptation.

Returning to her hometown of Jerusalem with her young family after several years abroad, documentarian Danae Elon offers an intimate, ground’s-eye view of one of the most fiercely contested cities in the world.

This documentary takes you on a reflective journey into the extended family of Nova Scotia’s Mi'kmaq community. Revisiting her own roots, Mi'kmaq filmmaker and mother Catherine Anne Martin explores how the community is recovering its First Nations values, particularly through the teachings of elders and a collective approach to children-rearing. Mi'kmaq Family is an inspiring resource for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences who are looking for ways to strengthen and explore their own families and traditions. We hear the Mi'kmaq language spoken and a lullaby is sung by a Mi'kmaq grandmother featured in the film.

Animation pioneer Evelyn Lambart recalls arriving at the NFB in the 1940s, her celebrated collaborations with Norman McLaren and her approach to her solo work.

I Am Skylar is the emotionally compelling story of an articulate girl who is thoughtfully defining her future and the woman she is to become. Skylar faces the complexities of being a transgender girl on the cusp of puberty with refreshing honesty and unshakeable dignity.

What happens to history’s forgotten people? How did a young Polish woman manage to spend years living in a Tanzanian village in the 1940s? Through this ambitious, highly personal film, Jonathan Durand exposes the tragic fate of nearly 1,000,000 Poles who were deported to Siberian labour camps during the Second World War, and the thousands of them who wound up in Africa after periods of exile in Iran and India. Featuring the unforgettable recollections of his own grandmother, meticulous historical research and a gripping personal quest, the film exposes a deliberately erased chapter of history, and questions the nature of identities rooted in exile.

Julien Robichaud works with newcomers who move to Canada. His clients often question the name of his hometown, Moncton, named after General Monckton, a British colonel responsible for several hateful acts against Acadians including the Deportation. Julien digs to find who is this character of Monckton and the symbolic place he occupies today in his community.

What is it about the Camino de Santiago that lures people from around the world to walk hundreds of kilometres across Spain with just a backpack and a pair of boots?

In Gaspésie in rural Quebec, a quirky Chinese motel owner navigates his quiet routine between fixing rooms and casting lines into the sea — until his filmmaker son visits for a week.

Being mixed-race can be challenging, navigating the world often feels complicated. Aesha shares her journey from childhood to adulthood. Facing toxic environments but finding strength in the right people and embracing who you are is the key to making it easier.

Eight-year-old Landon Moise shows us around his favorite forested spots in his home community, Clearwater River Dene Nation. He explains why the environment is important.

A documentary short.

Part 9 of 9-part feature Imitations of Life (2003).

The film is about Moses Coady, who was called many things in his lifetime, but who proved to be the most effective social reformer Canada has known. He went into the villages, organized the people into study groups, helped them set up credit unions and co-operatives, and freed them from the semi-feudal conditions they lived in. Today, people from all over the world come to study his methods at the Coady International Institute in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. (NFB)

Broken Courage is a film about memory, history and reconciliation. It's about how trauma has touched us all, the interconnectivity of stories and their power to heal. Meet Suon Rottana, a teenage Khmer Rouge rebel, a soldier with the Cambodian army, a prisoner of war and a landmine amputee. Suon is now a wounded man looking for redemption and reconciliation. His journey of reflection led him to share his story as a tour guide at several memorial war museums just outside the majestic temples of Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Through a unique combination of visual images the video plays with a certain vision of reality and illusion - histories and culture(s) and the ambiguities of a cultural or a national identity. The artist combines the work created - video and computer techno-applications to explore her aesthetics ... Each set of geographical, political and sociological circumstances prescribe different labels. We come to believe in labels and to limit ourselves within the parameter of that imposed identity. We have to struggle to mediate between what we know to be the self and the outward deluge of imposed descriptors.

Spectacular images of international snowmobile competitions that are reserved only for expert owners of the most powerful machines.

In February 2018, 20 year old Ryan Shtuka disappeared from the British Columbia alpine resort town of Sun Peaks. A year later the search continues.

Thank You Kate Bornstein explores a simple question: What is a man and what is a woman? Inspired by the works of transgendered performance artist and author Kate Bornstein, the video piece explores various social misconceptions that construct this very dichotomy.

A short documenting the pathway to inner peace with self, the unfortunate burden of accountability, grief and growth come crashing together with the help of a worldwide pandemic. Unified struggle can create an isolating disconnect.

This short vignette features coal mines in New Waterford and Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, along with traditional Cape Breton folk songs sung by Men of the Deeps - a miners' choral group.

A short history of Canada's greatest sailing ship.

"We wanted to tell a story with a woman we love,” say directors Cassandra Surina and David Ehrenreich. “A true outlier wherever she calls home.” Graphic designer Asami Tsukada is a Japanese expat living in Canada. She has lived half of her life in Tokyo and the other half in Vancouver, but has found “community and isolation, acceptance and discrimination in both cultures equally.

Shot during three seasons, Kenuajuak's documentary tenderly portrays village life and the elements that forge the character of his people: their history, the great open spaces and their unflagging humour. Though Kenuajuak appreciates the amenities of southern civilization that have made their way north, he remains attached to the traditional way of life and the land: its vast tundra, the sea teeming with Arctic char, the sky full of Canada geese. My Village in Nunavik is an unsentimental film by a young Inuk who is open to the outside world but clearly loves his village. With subtitles.

Short documentary featuring the small Montreal based surf-punk band No Waves.

Canadian documentary

Before the Plate follows each ingredient from a single plate of food backwards to the farms they came from, revealing modern farming practices and the challenges the industry faces as it does so.

The landscape of Lake Ontario is transformed into an ominous expanse using hand processing techniques.

"Whereas SQUARE INCH FIELD was composed largely in the camera, Rimmer's next film, MIGRATION, made full use of rear-projection rephotography, stop-framing, and slow motion. The migration of the title is interpreted as the flight of a ghost bird through aeons of space/time, through the micro-macro universe, through a myriad of complex realities. A seagull is seen flying gracefully in slow motion against a grainy green sky; suddenly the frame stops, warps and burns, as though caught in the gate of the projector. Now begins an alternation of fast and slow sequences in which the bird flies through time-lapse clouds and fog and, in a stroboscopic crescendo, hurtles into the sun's corona. Successive movements of the film develop rhythmic, organic counterpoints in which cosmic transformations send jelly fish into the sky and ocean waves into the sun." - Gene Youngblood. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.

Death in the Garden of Paradise is an intensely personal meditation on the murder of the filmmaker's father and sister in Lahore by an unknown intruder. The disassociation caused by traumatic loss and the impossibility of knowing the identity of the killer flow seamlessly into the film's aesthetics so that familiar sights become strange, shopkeepers and passing pedestrians become suspects, and sound is fragmented and distorted. Architecture and haunted spaces, deserted gardens, photographs and paintings are both metaphors and physical locations in this elegant elegy to mortality

A dialogue is born in a prison between Spoon, an African American poet imprisoned for life, and me. After eight years of conversation, Spoon’s words console me, while my ear is a channel for him to the outside world. The film takes as a starting point the desire to measure the power of language, both his poetry and his activist prose, and to share notions of time.

I was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and arrived in Montreal (Canada) at the age of one with my parents. In August 2010, I went to Cambodia for the first time, the country my father hadn't returned in 30 years. Everybody told me that it would change my life, that I was finally going to find the answers to all my questions. Things didn't happened the way we expected them.

In an age when Hip-Hop culture is captivating the minds and hearts of millions globally, Canada's capital is generally left out of the conversation. City Limits explores the sounds, stories, history, and future of Hip-Hop within Ottawa.

Canada is facing a housing crisis, and cooperative housing might be a part of the solution.

I have not spoken to my father in over fifteen years. Still, the memories of him seem to survive in me, like a badly healed tumor. I have to eliminate that cancer, my father.

The dying Jewish community of Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, so small it can't always raise a minyan (the required quorum of ten men for prayer services) is profiled, warts and all, in this fascinating time capsule. Their children have left for Montreal, Toronto and Halifax and now only the older people remain keeping the spark of Jewishness alive. Their attitudes, including not allowing women into the minyan, and their feelings about the imminent demise of their community, contribute to a poignant portrait of a Jewish world that will soon exist only in memory.

A thought-provoking and genre-bending look behind the scenes of what might be the world's only underground DIY anarcho-feminist porn collective.

"My film shows queer poetry by non-binary poet Mo Bolduc, in French language, interpreted in Quebec Sign Language by 4 deaf people, among them, Karl who is gay and who’s got two fights. The poetry permitted for hearing and deaf people to meet around the feeling of not being included and the importance of the acceptance of oneself." –E.P.

Something astonishing is happening in the city of Vancouver. Largely unnoticed amidst vehicle traffic, industrial sites and construction, wild salmon are returning to their ancient spawning grounds. Once an important salmon bearing area, this watershed became severely degraded as the city grew… but the rewilding has begun to pay off.

Intruders: Abductees Speak Out! presents an intimate portrait of self-proclaimed alien abductees who are coping with the daily turmoil of being regularly taken by entities not from this world. Are they simply mistaken or disturbed? Or are they - as some experts contend - unwitting participants in an ominous alien agenda?

An incident from the early days of Québec's quiet revolution, tailor-made for the cartoonist. It is the story of a Montréal commuter train, a unilingual ticket collector and a bilingual passenger. The passenger appears on screen himself to describe his bid to have tickets requested in French as well as in English. What ensued, and how even the railway president became involved, is illustrated with wit and humor.

Concert live at Astoria, London 28th September 2001 with bonus footage of the band behind the scenes and a selection of official music videos.

A documentary focused on capturing the past, present, and future of Cobalt, Ontario.

This film is about the building of a traditional log cabin in Québec. It starts with the tree and finishes with the housewarming. While it is not a realistic housing option for many Canadians, it does provide encouragement for all of us to re-examine the resources around us that we may not be using effectively, if at all.

“Confessions of a Str8 Drag King” is a one-hour documentary that explores the exotic world of femme identity and drag performance. “Confessions” chronicles the experience of “hetero-queer” straight girl Jessica Barrett as she develops her alter-egos, Lulu LeMoan and Lawrence Orlando. Under the tutelage of “drag daddy” Edward Malaprop and with the support of Stilettos and Strap-Ons Burlesque troupe Jessica learns to morph from hyper-feminine to ultra-masculine at the drop of a hat.

C’est La Vie: The Chris J. Melnychuk Story documents the award-winning animator’s (Alien, Zap Girl Makes Toast) battle with tongue cancer. Building on live footage from Chris’s last, unfinished film, C’est La Vie was created posthumously through the collaboration of 19 animators from Quickdraw Animation in Calgary, Canada.

A poetic, performative documentary based on the improvised monologue of veteran actor Shahram Golchin.