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In her deeply personal debut feature, award-winning filmmaker Carol Nguyen charts her family’s first reunion since her uncle’s mysterious death. Travelling together to Vietnam, the family embarks on a revelatory—and at times uncanny—journey through intergenerational trauma and many-layered loss. With care and probing curiosity, Nguyen guides her loved ones as they navigate unsealed medical records and a decades-long silence, ultimately leading them back to each other. A metaphysical poem for complex mourning, Still Night, Burning House shows how storytelling can transform grief into collective healing.

Walker takes us on a personal journey into a world of myth and imagination that he learned from his grandmother. He travels from the Moors of Devon and the Highlands of Scotland to the brooding Celtic landscapes of Ireland and the intimate hills of Cape Breton, in his search of this potent “otherworld” of the imagination.

Leaving Mundania explores the colorful lives of "cosplayers" by delving beyond the common stereotypes of anime enthusiasts who express their fandom through costuming and roleplay. This film follows several cosplayers from the Greater Toronto Area as they prepare for their annual pilgrimage to Anime North, the largest anime fan convention in Canada. Through candid footage and in-depth interviews, Leaving Mundania offers an intimate view of participatory fan culture, revealing how cosplayers stand apart from the "mundanes" of the everyday world.

A tense, tight close-up of stunt man Ken Carter's role on the stock-car racing track. Risking life and limb to rocket a car from a ramp over a parked line of cars takes more than the will to make a living. What else is involved is shown by the film as the camera looks and listens while the stunt man readies for his act and then makes his wild ride.

Part documentary, part drama, this film presents the life and work of Jack Kerouac, an American writer with Québec roots who became one of the most important spokesmen for his generation. Intercut with archival footage, photographs and interviews, this film takes apart the heroic myth and even returns to the childhood of the author whose life and work contributed greatly to the cultural, sexual and social revolution of the 1960s.

An experimental film about the politics of fashion and the fashion of politics.

For decades the iconic track “Bam Bam” has been a sampled darling within the music industry, creating many new stars along the way. But what do we know of its legendary creator? From Kingston to the world, witness the transcendent stylings and legacy of Sister Nancy.

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.

Bees are one of the most important species on the planet. A look at the trials and tribulations of two particular honeybees over two years from birth to death.

"I decided to make a film at my kitchen table, there is nothing like knowing my table. The high art of the housewife. You take prisms, glass, lights and myself to it. 'The Housewife is High.' Water Sark is a film sculpture, being made while you wait."

This documentary takes an in-depth look at the witch hunts that swept Europe just a few hundred years ago. False accusations and trials led to massive torture and burnings at the stake and ultimately to the destruction of an organic way of life. The film questions whether the widespread violence against women and the neglect of our environment today can be traced back to those times.

Paul and Lindsey, a couple who left the hustle of city life for country life. From caring for animals to sustaining the land, their journey is filled with challenges, heartwarming triumphs, and a deep connection to nature. Discover how they’ve redefined what it means to live a meaningful life.

A film aimed at helping amateur theatre groups stage plays. There are practical tips on casting, rehearsing, sets, and costumes.

Ibuka follows Valentine and Jean-Claude, a new couple, at the very beginning of the civil war and the massacres that swept through Rwanda in 1994. Living in Kigali, the national capital, these young parents make numerous attempts to escape the killings with their newborn. Ibuka is a poetic work filled with tenderness and clarity about a historical tragedy, experienced through the intimacy and formation of a young family forever bonded.

Deeply rooted in artistic families, young Luben Boykov and Elena Popova escape the repressions of communist Bulgaria and find refuge on the island of Newfoundland in 1990. With their 2-year-old daughter and sixty dollars they begin to build a new life. At the height of what many would define as success, they leap again, understanding that the greatest risk for art, and for love, is taking it for granted.

In a country offering almost no treatment services despite a crisis of addiction, Laila Haidari took the highly unusual decision to found her own pioneering addiction treatment center and a restaurant where all of the waiters are recovering heroin addicts. A deeply personal perspective on the global addiction epidemic, the film follows the labor of love of one woman fighting to keep her center alive in the face of physical threats, governmental opposition and the departure of the international community from Afghanistan.

On Quebec's North Shore, the Magpie River is one of the last free-flowing rivers in this part of the world. In 2021, it became the first river in North America to gain legal rights through legal personhood.

André Chagnon's groundbreaking journey to becoming the founder of Videotron.

Kids, not everyone wants them. Here's an in-depth look at Western women who've decided not to reproduce and the challenges that this decision still poses in 2015.

Once the main road between Toronto and Ottawa, Highway 7 is now (in part) a black ribbon of failed businesses and derelict properties. Howard Gibbs's 80-year-old gas station needs new tanks or the inspectors will shut him down. He's desperate to lure his daughter back from the city to help carry on the family legacy. Next door, David and Linda, a couple who moved from the city, are set to open an upscale B&B. But what would lead them to build here, along a derelict stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway?

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.

At once simple, profound and light-hearted, Minutes is a play on words; a deliberative game and puzzle.

A documentary following the legal battles between Phil Demers and Marineland, and exposing the mistreatment of animals in theme parks.

Misogyny and gender norms are deeply rooted concepts in our society. In this experimental documentary, various speakers, accompanied by specialists, discuss their experiences with this subject. Taking this issue very seriously, the film crew takes center stage, exposing these taboos in a humorous tone, mixed with several colorful metaphors to support the expressed points. All of this ensures that Différenci[elles] is not a traditional documentary.

An examination of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, the film centres on Rod McLeod, a man who is suing the church for restitution after having been abused in childhood by priest William Hodgson “Hod” Marshall, and includes testimonial interviews from some of Marshall's other victims.

A portrait of the filmmaker’s brother-in-law Steve Jackson with psychedelic photograph animation synchronized to music performed by Chuck Aliamo.

I go to Movieland at least once a week, every week, for the last five years to sink some quarters into the games and the Movieland movie is an accumulation of the friends, lights, textures, and narratives that I have experienced in that time. I love Movieland!

A Canadian union and workers in a GM plant mobilize to save it in what will become the fight of their lives.

A journey into the lives of the famed Vachon wrestling family through the eyes of Paul “The Butcher” Vachon, the last living member of the dynasty.

In this very personal and poetic film, veteran documentarian Serge Giguère pores through 100 letters written by his late mother to him and his 15 siblings. In them, she details the trials and tribulations of raising 16 children in rural Quebec, while helping to run a family carpentry business.

Follows freeskiers Heitz and Anthamatten as they travel to the world’s high-altitude mountain ranges and attempt to make their distinct mark on those giant peaks, exploring the absolute limit of human possibility.

William G. Wilson is co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, a man included in TIME Magazine's "100 Persons of the 20th Century." Interviews, recreations, and rare archival material reveal how Bill Wilson, a hopeless drunk near death from his alcoholism, found a way out of his own addiction and then forged a path for countless others to follow. With Bill as its driving force, A.A. grew from a handful of men to a worldwide fellowship of over 2 million men and women - a success that made him an icon within A.A., but also an alcoholic unable to be a member of the very society he had created. A reluctant hero, Bill Wilson lived a life of sacrifice and service, and left a legacy that continues every day, all around the world.

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.

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.

In the minutes that it takes for a day to lose itself to darkness, we see a house that has suddenly become empty. It is the home of Maria, who has recently passed, and who has left her mark in every corner of every room. A portrait of absence is also an attempt to resurrect the dead, perhaps even a moment of magical thinking. The winter outside is well settled, snow accompanies each thought. Based on a poem by Zofia Bohdanowiczowa.

Hailing from the remote village of Alert Bay, British Columbia snowboarder Spencer O’Brien dedicated her life to becoming a world champion. But, being driven to win came at a cost. Snowboarding at the elite level was taking Spencer further from her Indigenous heritage than she realized. Precious Leader Woman tells Spencer’s story from childhood to the world stage, to coming full circle to embrace her identity as she pushes forward bringing her heart and soul to her next challenge, the backcountry.

A study of the wily brown rat, humankind's unwanted companion throughout the world, whose bite on the world's food resources adds to the growing threat of shortage. In a normal, free-ranging environment, the rat is more than a match for its hosts and colonies flourish. Under abnormal conditions of restricted space and limited food, a rat colony loses all 'social' constraints on behaviour. The film has implicit analogies for all animal behaviour, including humanity's. Plagues, predators and extermination attempts are among the topics discussed.

Lucien Francoeur, rock poet of the French imagination of North America, lives the destiny he has chosen for himself at 200 miles an hour.

IDFA and Canadian filmmaker Peter Wintonick had a close relationship for decades. He was a hard worker and often far from home, visiting festivals around the world. In 2013, he died after a short illness. His daughter Mira was left behind with a whole lot of questions, and a box full of videotapes that Wintonick shot for his Utopia project. She resolved to investigate what sort of film he envisaged, and to complete it for him.

James Simonee, an Inuit hunter from Pond Inlet, Nunavut, investigates the impacts of one of Nunavut’s largest mines on traditional lands near his community.

This short film tells the story of a meeting between two neighbours, in Ahuntsic and Villeray, around memories of Portugal; it is a story of two very different cities, Montreal and Lisbon; of an old man who has come to terms with death; of two strangers separated by an ocean but connected by the flight of a homing pigeon. Birds are the guides for this poetic meandering, exploring memories of the past and portents of the future. A dissonant score accompanies a split screen, completing the impression that we are confronted with a sensory puzzle, at once natural and urban, in which meditation takes its cues from fragments of reality. Matthew Wolkow’s film is a gentle ornithological, human and floral tale, suffused with both hope and the grim anxieties of our time. (Apolline Caron-Ottavi)

The last film Denis Villeneuve made during his participation in the third season of La Course Destination Monde, a show broadcast on Radio-Canada in which contestants travelled to different regions of the world to make short films about their journeys. This was presented in the Gala episode to mark the end of the program, before Villeneuve recieved his award for being the winning participant.

Two Canadian experts in underwater filming, Mario Cyr and Jill Heinerth, join forces for the first time to record how Arctic wildlife is adapting to the dramatic effects of climate change.

The evolution of the zombie from its roots in Haitian voodoo to its coveted role as the world's most popular monster: from being a clumsy corpse to becoming a cannibal killer and the main agent of every infectious pandemic, the zombie has come a long way in seventy years. A look at the rising tide of zombie culture examining why something so dead has so much life in viewers' nightmares and at the box office.

Filmmaker Claude Demers tells the story of his search for his biological mother and their eventual meeting. He does this in voice-over, accompanied by images from Canada's national archives. The painstakingly selected and fluidly edited black-and-white clips build up, like the perfectly fitting pieces of a puzzle; an impression of his mother as he had imagined her. How she grew up, worked, loved and left him.

The film tells the cultural story of Berlin during the Weimar Republic through interviews with a number of persons who were involved in literature, film, art, and music during the period. It includes interviews with Christopher Isherwood, Louise Brooks, Lotte Eisner, Elisabeth Bergner, Francis Lederer, Carl Zuckmayer, Gregor Piatigorsky, Claudio Arrau, Rudolf Kolisch, Mischa Spoliansky, Herbert Bayer, Mrs. Walter Gropius, and Arthur Koestler.

Arthurian myth and Sikh legend collide in a monochrome portrait of the Nihang warriors of India.

To support his mother in Mexico, Angel, a nude dancer, turns the web into his new stage.

"Lorraine" is a riveting 15-minute documentary that delves into the remarkable journey and accomplishments of Lorraine Michael, a Lebanese-Newfoundlander who has made a significant impact as a politician for Newfoundland and Labrador. Known for her unwavering dedication to social activism and her tireless efforts to serve the people of Newfoundland and Labrador, Michael's story is one of inspiration and community empowerment, leaving a lasting impression on all who encounter it.

Follow two Canadians, Bob Lush and Mike Birch, aboard their yachts during the 1980 Observer Singlehanded Transatlantic Race. More than a record of this prestigious international sailing event, the resulting film is the starting point for an epic of challenge and determination.

Que ta joie demeure is not a documentary about being a slave to the machine, alienation, dehumanisation or exploitation. Sound and image, editing and dramatic structure are merely employed to transpose workshops and factory floors into the cinematic space so as to explore the bizarre environments that workers adapt to and with which they skillfully interact, as if humanity had never done anything else since time immemorial.

One Image, Two Acts examines the photographic archives of British Petroleum during its operations in Iran, unraveling BP’s widespread construction of cinemas in the oil towns of Iran. The film is a coalescence of infrastructures, images, and archives of oil wherein cinematic time and geological time mobilize different sites, temporalities, and numerous material modalities in the colonial episteme.

A short documentary about artists in the entertainment industry and how they’re staying creative during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Raw, revealing and honest, Just Be Gemma explores the subject of gender transformation by telling the personal story of St. John’s, Newfoundland activist Gemma Hickey. Gemma is best known for co-leading the movement that legalized same-sex marriage in Canada and they're the founder of Pathways, an organization that offers support to survivors of clergy sexual abuse. Just Be Gemma is an all-access documentary revealing Gemma's physical changes and internal struggles.