Discover Movies

A young man uses the power of dance to teach vulnerable teens the power of mentorship and community.

A silent film hagiography of the Grand Pré region of Nova Scotia. Title cards illuminate the historical plight of the Arcadians in the time of the Great Upheaval. An unknown actress portrays Longfellow's Evangeline.

In the Galapagos Islands, a group of scientists works to understand the movements of the world's largest fish - the whale shark. Without understanding their breeding and migrations, we cannot hope to protect them. The scientists of the Galapagos Whale Shark Project head north to Darwin Island to uncover the secrets of these ocean giants.

If it had happened in America, MIDIAN FARM would be a Hollywood script. Instead, its legacy is memorialized through a compelling point-of-view historical Canadian documentary. From 1971 - 1977, MIDIAN FARM was a back-to-the-land social experiment created by a community of urban baby boomers from Toronto. Part of the youth counterculture movement during a period of social and political re-imagining, its utopian vision eventually collapsed. More than four decades later, filmmaker Liz Marshall unearths a transformative piece of family and Canadian history.

Created by Anishnabe Videographer Joe Beardy and trainee Darlene Naponse, Aboriginal Radio Waves Part I is the first part of a two part series about community radio. Through interviews and visuals, the video shares with you the voices of station managers, volunteers, DJs, and community members.

A compilation of short videos made by and about Indigenous elders from Moose Factory, Kingston, Guelph, Thunder Bay, Peterborough, Sioux Lookout, Toronto, Rama First Nations, and Ottawa.

This short documentary observes and explores the interesting life and career of the Indigenous-African-Canadian/American multi-hyphenate (DJ, entertainer, entrepreneur, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Nation council member, and music instructor) Orene Askew as she talks about her work, her identity, her sexuality, and her understanding of the world.

Troublemaker on the Frequency is a short experimental video that explores mis-communication through found sound recordings, amateur radio, and glitch.

A documentary film about a DIY show in Toronto, and a film intended to capture the feeling of freedom and fun associated with that.

The year 2004 marks the 35th anniversary of the 1969 New York riots at Stonewall Inn.

The film is a meditation into fantasy and the solitude of love. Hand processed film and advanced editing give "Her" an ephemeral and timeless quality which illustrates the intensity of the subject matter.

What's happened to oral history? What was it like being queer in Vancouver in the 50s? The 60s? The 70s? Where did people hang out? What did they fight for? What do they miss? Armed with curiosity and a cameraman, writer/storyteller Ivan E. Coyote and musician Veda Hille set out to talk to the people who were there. Stories of the Vanport, the International Women's Conference, communal life in the West End and the Castle Kiss-In all come together to make a picture of our city in the middle of the last century.

Dragonfly unveils the vulnerable position of mankind in the uncertain environment we have helped create.

Mars-Womb-Man is a companion to Diamond's earlier film. The artist finds answers for some of his old questions as he explodes binary concepts of man, woman, mother, and father.

Before Keltie came along, the women in her family removed their facial hair and told no one. Keltie is proud of her beard and tells her story to us in this single-take film.

An anxious and overzealous drag queen attempts to perform a lip sync of Tammy Wynette's Stand By Your Man, out takes and all. The videotape raises many questions on the desirability and exoticism of transvestites. It is also an homage to songstress Wynette, the queen of tragedies.

Meet Montreal's Mambo Drag Kings, a dapper group of lip synching lesbians who entertain in style. This part documentary, part performance tape apes family value sitcoms by inserting black and white parodies of television shows starring the Kings.

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.

Leah takes the oral tradition to its extreme in Portrait of a Woman of Colour.

A historical, cultural look at transsexuality among the Lakota People. Dr. Napewastewiñ Schützer is a Blackfoot/Lakota woman with a doctorate in psychology, specializing in transsexuality. She is know in her culture as winkte, a gender-crosser.

This wonderfully sensuous and meditative work questions the conventional cross-cultural dilemma around sexual/cultural allegiances by highlighting the pleasures and richness of both forms of traditions, South Asian and North American.

A poignant articulation of introspection and alienation, over a crisply edited montage.

Mumsie is a stylish documentary that explores the bitter-sweet relations between mothers and daughters. Illustrated through stories that candidly expose wry truths in a hauntingly beautiful and economical style.

This is a documentary on the subject of male masturbation. It goes beyond the conventional talking head documentary and explores a new experimental genre where the body instead of the face is used as the communicative mode for the dissemination of information through the expression and demonstration of the act.

Nobody gets turned on by lists of do’s and don’ts. We need different strategies to help change sexual behaviour in the age of AIDS. This tapes attempts to eroticize safer sex practices and latex use. Rather than using explicit porn, the signifiers become gestural and facial to create an aura of eroticism. The address is pluri-sexual, the audience, everyone.

This video focuses on the experiences of four Asian men. Each person is in a different stage of HIV infection and each has significant experiences with various issues surrounding the disease. The interviews focus on the personal, the therapeutic, the medical and the political with HIV as a constant reference throughout.

Director Kamala Todd reflects on the land she is occupying and notions of livability.

Affinity is exactly this: a reciprocal knowledge between comrades, shared analysis that lead to prospectives of action. Affinity is therefore directed on one hand towards theoretical deepening and on the other towards intervention in social conflictuality.

Getting ready is a simple, sometimes daily act. This 16mm pink coloured black and white film is a portrait of a beautiful woman putting on things and taking off. Of glamour, of resignation of the self to the world for the day or evening; of objects strewn about, of stuff full of sparkles, gold, jewels and powder.

Death, and the history of sports and industry.

For Christopher Hunte, drag is a business, not a lifestyle. Christopher lets us watch as he transitions into Symone Says, and lets us in on stage life.

A short film on the subject of Indigenous Love. What is (romantic) love? And what does it mean to you? Eight couples share their thoughts.

A retired couple follows their childhood dream of producing maple syrup on Cape Breton Island.

The Story of Oil. This short documentary depicts the production of oil in the Turner Valley, in Alberta, from the initial exploration through the use of the finished products. This film is an informative mid-century portrait of the substance that ran so much of the world's daily lives—and still does.

When you think of ice climbing, the sunny Okanagan Valley in the Canadian British Columbia is probably one of the last places you would consider. Ice climbs have a dichotomous strength and delicacy, and the people that attempt to ascend them are resilient and determined. Though the ice climbing is unreliable, scarce, and fleeting due to the mild winters in the Okanagan, it does exist… it all depends on how badly you want to find it.

Monika Delmos's documentary captures a year in the life of two teenage refugees, Joyce and Sallieu, who have left their own countries to make a new life in Ontario. Joyce, 17, left the Democratic Republic of Congo to avoid being forced into prostitution by her family. Sallieu, 16, had witnessed the murder of his mother as a young boy in wartorn Sierra Leone.

This feature documentary paints an engaging portrait of Oumar, an auto mechanic from Burkina Faso. Always ready to lend a helping hand, Oumar has become a vital, central part of his community, in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood. People tend to gather round as he works, and talk often turns to weighty issues: feminism, polygamy, politics, religion. In eight months’ time, he is due to return for a visit with his family after six years away, so he is searching for hundreds of presents to take with him. Back home, when you leave the nest, it’s to look for wealth. Otherwise, failure awaits…

Blackfoot and Dene artist Lauren Crazybull describes her personal story of resilience and empowerment through her illustrations and painted murals.

In 1982, the West Vancouver Highlanders were in the provincial championship game against a cross town rival. This was the first appearance for West Van and their head coach, Brian Upson. It would also be his last game. Brian was fighting a losing battle against cancer and was living on borrowed time. What followed was one of the most incredible stories in basketball history.

Dress Making marks an early exploration in Eija Loponen-Stephenson’s work into developing what she has come to identify as “body-structures,” hybrid forms that blur the boundaries of body and object. Inspired by Wet and Messy fetish-play pornography, which often depicts models being thickly coated in and intimately communing with some sort of viscous substance, Dress Making proposes that coating one’s self in such substances is an elegant and empathetic gesture of body extension.

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

The second film to feature a cast of assisted readymade clock sculptures (after Irregular Time Signatures). Starring “Sublimation Clock”, “Litmus Clock”, “Writer’s Block”, “Atomizer”, and “The Crypt.” Prior to shooting Dailies, the film and these clock sculptures were exhibited together in a 2011 exhibition in Malmö.

An array of beguiling images—from insect wings to coin slots, carnival lights, and beyond—comprise the latest experimental short from Indie Grits alum Anna Kipervaser, a silent response to her 2017 short And By the Night.

A revealing portrait of two young addicts, their life on the street and their despairing parents who find themselves powerless to save their children from the habit that is consuming them. As filmmaker Andrée Cazabon follows Cathy and Laurent for many months, recording their desperate drug-fuelled existence, she remembers her own life on the street. "My parents and I relived that horror," she says of her creative journey. But it was for all parents that she made this film. Cathy's and Laurent's parents live in a permanent state of bewildered anxiety and guilt. How can they avoid being totally destroyed by grief? How do they manage to carry on with their lives, in spite of everything? And how do they deal with a system that views them with suspicion? By grimly showing two children in the grip of a brutal addiction, No Quick Fix hopes to alleviate and identify some of the enormous pain endured by parents coping with an addicted child.

Over the course of 4 months, we follow a group of teenagers around their small town in Canada.

Yen-Chao Lin travelled along the east coast of Taiwan – an area characterized by its wild nature, colonization and population exodus. The Amis is the largest of many ethnic minorities in Taiwan officially recognised as indigenous peoples. In search of different spiritual practices belonging to the indigenous people of Makuta’ay, Yen-Chao Lin places the memories of the old Amis spirit keepers on an equal footing with the practices of Daoist rituals and Presbyterian burials, allowing personal prayers to resound and collective resistance to emerge. The Spirit Keepers of Makuta’ay was shot on Super 8 film and developed by the director by hand. The effects created during the development process add an additional layer of spiritual interpretation. A miniature, an essay, an impressionistic painting.

A meditative journey, using and manipulating archival silent film footage, that investigates the look of the "New Woman" in Chinese silent screen.

This film advocates the consolidation of rural schools into larger education centers and the use of mass transportation for children attending these new schools. The Rugged Road to Learning dramatizes a day in the life of children who, before consolidation, had to travel through the snowy woods to attend a cold country schoolhouse. Later in the film, a larger, consolidated school encompassing five Ontario country districts is featured favourably. Scenes show happy and lively children who are ready to learn. The use of dramatic scenes to underline a film's message was a common technique by the 1920s. Although this film is far from subtle, it was well understood that "the great mass of the movie public want to be amused and entertained not instructed, and if they are to be educated it must be in a subtle, delicate manner"

Endowed with unmistakable magnetism, boundless energy, leadership and a passion for everything he did, Roberto "Bob" Bissonnette dared to create his life according to his vision, independently. From his hockey career, where he was captain of the Hull Olympics, as well as the 10th most punished player in the history of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League (QMJHL), to his career as a songwriter and singer he attracted crowds everywhere in Quebec, in French Canada and in several European countries. His tragic death in a helicopter crash at the age of 35 caused a shock wave.

Eric St-Pierre is a good man, cheerful, colorful, dog lover, who one day had the idea to found an organism in order to help his fellows. A foundation called: MIRA. To date, the foundation has given more than 3,000 dogs that brought help and comfort to people that haven’t been pampered by life.

Colour documentary about Lithuania in 1937-1938 by Motūzas Brothers is made for Lithuanian community schools and youth organisations in Canada to show Lithuania's life before the Soviet occupation in June 1940. It shows the Lithuanian countryside, cities and towns, architecture, people's daily life, the most important events of 1937 - 1938 years.

A subtle-spherical text-image composition about South Georgia, an island group of the Antarctic—a stretch of coast into which humanity’s devastating overexploitation has been inscribed.

Mutus Floris (mute or silent flowers) is composed of over 5000 individual photographs of wild flowers taken over three seasons, at Phenzhopehaugh in Scotland.