Discover Movies

Madeleine Parent's history

Karen Zaitchik jumps on and off moving boxcars, throws switches, pulls brakes and uncouples freights with ease and confidence. She's a railroader for CN and that's what this 21-year-old highly individualistic woman wants out of life for the moment. This colourful short film shows how Karen manages in the traditionally male world of the railroad.

This short doc is a novel look at driver safety and the consequences of a change from Jekyll to Hyde behind the wheel of a car.

Reality Entertainment and The Sylvanic Cooperation presents "Discovering Bigfoot." Discovering Bigfoot is the first feature film documentary with real live interaction between a Bigfoot creature, wilderness experts, PhD's and other world renowned experts and researchers of the Bigfoot enigma.

A post-modern documentary about the meaning and nature of love from a gay perspective.

The courageous journey of a determined disabled advocate living with a tethered spinal cord and chronic pain, while balancing love, legacy and the fight for bodily autonomy as she chooses how she wants to leave the world: on her own terms.

What is a true punk band? We sit down with St. John's punk band, Banana Vacuum, to explore punk culture and question what it takes to be punk in today's world. This new band has gained some notoriety in the past year for it's unusual lead singer and themes throughout the album. This film explore the people behind Banana Vacuum and the music that has made fans all over Canada go wild for their unapologetic true punk identity.

In this program, devotees of Wicca and practitioners of tarot, astrology, palmistry, and other arcane arts explain their gifts of divination and healing while reflecting on their efforts to reconcile their unorthodox callings with Biblical injunctions and sometimes hostile skepticism. Wiccan initiation rites and psychic counseling sessions shed light on obscure practices that are very much alive today and in demand by a diverse constituency that even includes police

A Cree Approach follows Tristin Greyeyes on a deeply personal journey to understand why Cree was not her first language, unraveling the story of her late grandmother, Freda Ahenakew.

This moving film tells the story of Hoolboom's close friend and collaborator Mark Karbusicky, who unexpectedly committed suicide in 2007. Interviews with Mark's friends and family, as well as his lover, are interwoven with home movies, offering a glimpse into the life of this generous, loving and enigmatic figure. A powerful testimony to the enduring impact of our actions on the lives of others.

A silent dance documenting a brief visit to Minneapolis in the fall of 2022. A reflection on the sleeping city's tumultuous recent history through a recollected interaction and a plea for continued disturbance. Twin City Twist was shot on Kodak Tri-X reversal super 8 film with kaleidoscopic lenses. The film was scanned and edited digitally.

In the film, produced for the series "Young Scientists", for the CBC, a group of young people on vacation share the discovery of the application of the lever in some applications of everyday life.

Mining the depths of longing and loneliness, Isolating Landscapes expertly combines found footage, hand-processed film, and animation to build a layered archive of emotion and record the tenuousness of connection.

First Stop, China is a record of the choreographed performances and the unrehearsed moments of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens ballet company on the road, against a backdrop of unfamiliar sights and sounds. Their itinerary included China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, Japan and Korea.

Marées is a singular ode to the spirits of the Gaspesian Sea as experienced by its inhabitants.

Something Dancing About Her is an affectionate portrait of Pegi Nicol MacLeod, a charismatic yet relatively unknown painter. Shedding fresh light on her place in Canadian art history, director Michael Ostroff chronicles the life of this remarkable creative spirit who threw herself into painting, left-wing politics and love affairs with equal enthusiasm.

Traces the new Cold War between Russia and the West from the ban on American citizens adopting Russian children to the Kremlin’s anti-LGBTQ campaign, which positions the international marriage equality movement as a national threat.

30 GHOSTS chronicles rural Ontario horse farmer and paranormal-investigator-on-the-side, Kim Hadfield, over a year of intense struggle as she pursues her dream of proving to mankind that ghosts exist.

Portrait of the Dene, natives of the Northwest Territories whose way of life has been documented by an Oblate father who has lived with them for more than seventy years.

Filmed over Labour Day Weekend 2021, the busiest weekend in the park's history, the film explores this stunning landscape through fresh eyes: Zimbabwean-Canadian Gladys and her two children, who are trying backcountry camping for the first time, and Luis and Shaun, two queer immigrants from Toronto, who reveal the ways in which LGBTQ+ people are newly claiming space in the natural world. A celebration of diversity, the power of wilderness experiences and the deep bonds of family and friendship, The Long Weekend is a delightful documentary about the joys of nature and the need to preserve and protect it—and how to make it inclusive for generations to come.

A Day in the Life of a Bull-Dyke follows a big boned butch into skirmishes, drag, and the arms of a beautiful recruit. The public and private lives of this "strange animal" are explored with the reverence and glee found in the educational exposés like Reefer Madness and bad-boy films like Rebel without a Cause. However, because this fictionalized lesbian history is a first-person narrative, it is filled with all the joy, pain, and ambivalence each of us experiences while negotiating a marginalized identity.

Every year, the western world is introduced to a new 'superfood' that boasts extraordinary nutritional features, and year after year we buy them. The Superfood Chain is a feature documentary that explores the facts and myths behind superfoods, and reveals the ripple effect of the 'Superfood' industry on farming and fishing families around the world.

Man of the people, taxi driver, Jean Carignan is above all else one of the world's greatest violinists. In his hands reels become complex, intelligent creations, played with a virtuosity worthy of Paganni, and which continue the traditions of a genre passed on orally. A genre which has retained its popularity, and whose giants include Skinner, Coleman, Allard. Jean Carignan tackles their repertoire, as well as reaping the harvest of his exploration of Irish and Scottish musical traditions, which has made of him an internationally renowned specialist in Celtic music. This film is also a love story between an impoverished child and his violin, and provide a unique window into a remarkable era.

The history of nuns mirrors the history of all women -- in what we are taught about the past, women are almost invisible. Although today's one million nuns outnumber priests two to one, they must struggle to be heard by the all-male Roman Catholic hierarchy from which they are excluded. Behind the Veil: Nuns is the first film ever to record from a global perspective the turbulent history and remarkable achievements of women in religion, from pre-Christian Celtic communities to the radical sisters of the 1980s. Contemporary nuns of strength, dignity and commitment speak of their lives and of their predecessors.

SHIFT explores the loss associated with movement from one place to another and the loss associated with an intimate experience of death. Death deconstructs. Things fall apart including the sense of a unified self. Ideas of continuity and stability are eroded. Images shot in Scotland, Saskatchewan and Montreal are combined with studio footage to create an associative narrative about an experience for which ordinary language is inadequate.

A salt-of-the-earth Prince Edward Islander talks about the way things were, the way things are, and the way he sees it all.

'What kind of house does a man who has been imprisoned in a six-foot-by-nine-foot cell for over 30 years dream of?' This film captures the remarkable creative journey and friendship of Herman Wallace, one of the Angola 3, and artist Jackie Sumell while examining the injustice of prolonged solitary confinement.

Birth of a Giant (Naissance d'un géant in French) is a 29-minute 1957 Canadian documentary film, directed by Hugh O'Connor and produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) television series, Perspective. The film depicts the role of story of the conception, construction and testing of the Canadair Argus aircraft, designed as a maritime patrol and anti-submarine aircraft for the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF). The title is an acknowledgement, that at the time, the Argus was the largest aircraft ever built in Canada. Note: This film was distributed separately on 16mm for schools and libraries, qualifying it as a standalone documentary.

A deep dive into the history of the Canadian Government and the Department of National Defence leasing First Nations reserves as practice bombing ranges during World War I and World War II. This documentary follows the Enoch Cree Nation's process of developing it's land claim against the Canadian Government following the discovery of active landmines in the heart of the nation's cultural lands and golf course in 2014, almost 70 years later.

Filmmaker and journalist Francine Pelletier looks at Canadian author Mordecai Richler in the context of the Jewish authors and comedians of his era—Phillip Roth, Saul Bellow, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce and others. She explores various influences on Richler’s life and work: his childhood on St. Urbain Street, a religiously observant family upbringing and the Russian Jewish writer Isaac Babel. It also addresses his public stance against Canadian and Quebec nationalism. This film is a treasure trove of archival footage, and features interviews with writers such as Adam Gopnik, Margaret Atwood and David Bezmozgis.

Despite a workforce in quarantine, Canada planted almost 700 million trees in 2020 – the most ever. With future forests under threat, a young woman journies into the Canadian bush to endure a grueling and unconventional season of tree planting during a pandemic.

The Fantasy Makers is a feature documentary which examines the profound impact fantasy pioneers C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and George MacDonald have made on popular culture to this day. This film interviews scholars, writers, filmmakers and lovers of the fantasy genre throughout the world.

The first production from Frontier Films, the film production collective that was the successor to NYKino and the Workers Film and Photo League, Heart of Spain focuses on the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that became a touchstone of its era and was the most forceful opposition to the rising threat of fascism in Europe. Heart of Spain was begun by Geza Karpathi and Herbert Kline, who ultimately turned their footage over to Paul Strand, Leo Hurwitz, and Ben Maddow to make the film. It is compelling both for its shrewd formal aesthetics and as a sympathetic human document of the war.

What begins as a character study of an eccentric man who passes out flyers for a living, becomes an intense five year journey of self-discovery and the search for fame.

Documentary about the Holy Angels Residential School in Alberta, where hundreds of First Nations children were imprisoned.

Leading thinkers in music, philosophy, astronomy and physics explore music’s universal yet mysterious power to elicit ecstasy, following famed Spanish poet Federico García Lorca’s imaginative theory of its spiritual (or demonic) origins.

Firefighters in the United States and Canada form a controversial motorcycle club to cope with the crippling effects of post-traumatic stress disorder.

March 27, 1977. At 2:00 in the afternoon, a thick fog rolled into the usually quiet Los Rodeos Airport in Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. On the runway sat two fully loaded jumbo airliners. An explosion at a nearby airport had redirected air traffic to the undermanned airfield at Tenerife. Within three hours 583 people would be dead. This film reconstructs the moments leading up to the tragedy.

Using immersive camera work and a heart-pounding soundtrack, Faceless takes us to the frontline of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong to meet four young people who risk their lives and fly in the face of absolute power.

In the vast Atlantic Ocean, a mysterious ecosystem floats and thrives, vital at sea but disastrous on shore.

Arranged from A to Z in 26 segments, the video looks at the relationship between image and text. In a playful and satirical manner, it roams through past and present of the Asian experience within North America and beyond, from the Chinese railroad laborers, Hiroshima and the Korean War, to the arrivals of the Boat People and the Hong Kong money. Both simplistic and complex in its presentation, The Yellow Pages seeks to interact with the viewers, never allowing one single reading.

A retrospective documentary of the life and work of Jennifer Hodge, a black filmmaker living and working in Ontario and Quebec. Film includes footage of her funeral service, her family, friends and coworkers; clips from her films; and a memorial weekend at her family's home, Innisfree.

A Universal Language, documents the exciting once in a life time journey of six Canadian comedians, among them Canadian comedy icon Mark Breslin, as they explore comedy, identity and history throughout the Holy Land and use the weapons of comedy to try an

This short film chronicles filmmaker Nyla Innuksuk's emotional journey to Nunavut to connect with the land of her ancestors and with her Inuk father, whom she has not seen in over 20 years. Nyla's return to her Igloolik birthplace culminates with a lesson on lighting a qulliq, the traditional Inuit oil lamp.

Two decades after the initial exposé of the corporation, this follow-up unveils a world now fully remade in its image and perilously close to fascism.

John Walker grew up an Anglophone in Montreal in the years surrounding Quebec's Quiet Revolution. He witnessed first-hand the upheaval that transformed the political and cultural landscape. In those years, more than 500,000 English-speaking Quebecers left the province, many of them—including Walker—finding their way to Toronto. After decades as a cinematographer and documentary filmmaker, Walker decides to turn his lens on his own story and dig into the heart of the social revolution that shaped his identity. His immediate and extended family express their conflicted feelings about their place in modern Quebec. Others, from a police officer who diffused FLQ bombs to director Denys Arcand, contemplate the issues that drive Quebec's desire for sovereignty. A province's past is informed by personal reflection and Walker's perspective that "my grandmothers taught me that history is a path to understanding and myths and half-truths must be challenged." (Summary by Alexander Rogalski)

Vito is a sweet little boy with Down syndrome, and this short documentary puts his energetic, jolly personality on full display as he interacts with his loving family. By showing Vito’s dignity and inherent value, Vito-Man tackles the difficult conversation that is the eradication of people with Down syndrome, proving that an extra chromosome should not be a death sentence.

Voleurz's second film, released to DVD features skiing, snowboard, mountain biking and the other antics of the Voleurz family

First, there is the Appenzell countryside, and the melting snow that makes the streams overflow. Then the death of his mother, and the need to spend time with his father. On top of that, a global pandemic. Peter Mettler is a rare gem of a filmmaker. Here he (re)constructs the filmed diary of his intimate relationship with the world and the beings that inhabit it, in this work of documentary goldsmithery.