Discover Movies

A remix of sounds and images from the Prelinger Archives that feature instructions on how to walk safely.

In a reality continually refracted through the lens of corporate technology, what remains of those who don’t fit into this vision of the world? I Dream of Vancouver is an experimental short that explores this question through the digital landscape of Vancouver, BC. Using hypnagogic visuals and a haunting soundscape, this work expresses the detachment from the lived experience of spaces as these spaces are subsumed by algorithms and mediated images. While focusing on Vancouver as a case study, this documentary explores issues that are relevant to the world at large, such as the link between corporate technologies and gentrification and the erasure of those who don’t fit within Google’s agenda.

A meditation on death, a collective acceptance of mortality and a warm embrace for the present.

An endearing portrait of a South Asian father as he attempts to give life and marital advice to his bodybuilding and image-obsessed son.

A headstrong, farm boy wants to get back what he loses after landing in prison, only to discover what's on the outside, isn't what he wants at all.

A music producer determined to help young talents achieve their dream crosses path with an estranged female artist struggling to survive an abusive relationship.

Short film by Daïchi Saïto to celebrate Anthology Film Archives’ 50th Anniversary

Canada, once seen by Haitians as a constructive partner, conspired with the United States and France in 2003 to topple the democratically-elected government. Seven years in the making, Elaine Brière’s film meticulously reconstructs Canada’s role in the events that culminated in the United Nations-sanctioned coup d’état on February 29, 2004 and the bloody aftermath that followed.

Alexander von Humboldt climbs a volcano. A parade comes to town.

The journey through music and images of a long-distance relationship and how the things they love connect them.

Director Amanda Ann-Min Wong's short documentary profiles a young ceramic artist exploring the Canadian and Korean influences on his functional wares, examining cross-cultural identity, beauty in utility, and finding purpose in one's art.

A bio-doc about my pal Judy Rebick: iconic second wave Canadian feminist, radical activist, journalist and writer. She is the founding publisher of rabble.ca, Canada’s irreverent progressive online news source, and a former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, Canada’s largest women’s group. Shot in kinetic bursts of super 8, the only voice is Judy’s, impelling a trek through a devastated family, the struggle for women’s right to choose and the challenge of neo-liberalism. A series of six public moments (marked by speeches and TV spots) structure a life collage that arrives in six movements. A fractured movie for fractured times.

We are constantly in conversation with the Other, either symbolically or literally. In the process of responding to the symbolic Other, it is hard to tell if the response is to the subject or our own projection. This animation tries to visualize this question within the social contact of an individual or a crowd.

Digital memories of seasonal tragedies, "Smoke" is a personal snapshot of witnessing and documenting environmental destruction.

The Quinta da Regaleira in Sintra, Portugal is a huge estate that has two initiation wells built into the ground. This film takes us into one of them.

"Wave Form" explores movie viewing, sharing and making as a means of confronting the experience of mental illness. It illuminates the sustaining, transformative powers of film by transforming a variety of “waves” from cinematic history—ocean waves, waving hands, waves of soldiers—through the luma waveform scope, a technical feature of movie editing software. Converted into luma waveforms, the original filmic images are rendered unrecognizable, their representational nature exchanged for a ghostly, mesmerizing shimmer.

A road trip documentary following the life of Métis freedom fighter Gabriel Dumont.

An experimental animated film built around a single sound recording that evokes travel, the need to communicate, solitude, fragility, the desire for freedom, the arrival of fall, and our ephemeral existence.

"I am sent to camp as a nine year old. I cannot swim, and my parents have gone to Europe for six weeks! It is 1954, and I have not been away from home much…so I refuse to swim, and fish off the dock. My mother writes in her trip book. It is the only book she will write. I catch a big fish. The camp director takes my picture… They should have taken me to Europe with them. I would have behaved." –R.R.

An upheaval - stitched and woven into abrupt 16mm light sculptures that reflect on besieged cities as they become ripped apart and reconfigured due to urban gentrification. The film material is sourced from fragments of rubble infrastructure dispersed and strewn about as older buildings are demolished and untold histories become erased. This film is an elegiac experimental map of the text and textures of cities in a state of flux.

A soap opera nightmare for the ages.

"Broken Relationship" moves through a kaleidoscope of colour and pixels to fragments of embraced bodies. Using glitched video footage from classic porn, the broken and distorted imagery speaks to the difficulty that the LBGTQ youth encounter when trying to navigate through their sexuality and relationships. Easy access to pornography means that many young people are learning these important life lessons through a distorted lens. This is especially true of the LGBTQ community where access to information is difficult to acquire from their family, teachers or even friends. The glitched video images mimic the broken messages that much of the porn industry communicates, certainly not the birds and the bee's stories that most youth grow up with.

Fifth Precinct's elite detectives investigate the city's dangerous SATANIC DEATH CULT which has been running rampant selling meth, sacrificing virgins and summoning GOD BEASTS. Produced for under $200, the film contains attack helicopters, explosions, werewolves with machine guns, satanic rituals, armoured vehicles, drug raids, missile launchers and a variety of high stakes gun fights and chases.

In this wry confessional video, Steve Reinke appears—shirtless and lavishly tattooed—in a basement, playing archival clips and delivering arch disquisitions on his filmmaking and the ways in which images represent his engagement with the world. Mortality, desire, empathy, and horror all feature as subjects of Reinke’s idiosyncratic erudition, which mutates from sincerity to irony to provocation.

A discarded plastic suit turned eco-friendly product explores the inter-implications of materiality and paid erotics. The incorporation of erotic movement, mouth work, and plasticized payment complicates overtly simplistic critiques of commerciality, calling for a queer environmental politics that does not demonize money-defined relationships entirely, but rather, works to unravel the greed and destruction of colonialism without forgetting the legitimacy of sex work.

An art professor tells the peculiar story of her student E., a strange young woman whose conceptual performance pieces and singular existence leave the professor increasingly adrift. Combining fictional narrative, personal anecdote and private conversation, Communicating Vessels explores how we influence each other in ways that are sometimes good, sometimes bad, yet always urgent and necessary. An unusual tribute to art and its creation, channelling seminal performances by Joan Jonas and Lygia Clark.

A lumberjack, named Frank, engraves his name on a tree before cutting it down, when a distant scream catches his attention. He heads towards the noise to discover something quite unexpected. This discovery will lead him to his destiny.

‘Atalaya’ is the Spanish word for watchtower. It’s also the name of the Chilean islands where in 1998 debris was found from the boat belonging to my seafaring father, Gerry Roufs, lost at sea.

Police helicopters loom over a quiet view of Detroit, USA on June 4 2020 following rising tensions and attacks on protestors advocating for justice after the brutal murder of George Floyd. A meditative view from neighbouring city Windsor, Canada quickly devolves into dizzying disarray. What has the free world become?

A daughter’s final promise to her dying mother comes true but the outcome is surprising and otherworldly.

Following a Black man on his marathon through life as he comes face-to-face with the realities of being Black in 2020.

As 14-year-old Hollie sews her first dress with her mother, she faces the decision all Mennonite girls must make as they reach adulthood. Will she put on the dress, become a full member of the Mennonite church and assume her role as a mother, or will she join the wider world?

2019 was a very significant celebration for LGBTQ+ rights internationally with the 50 year anniversary of Stonewall and in Canada the the 50th anniversary of the Criminal Law Amendment Act (also known as Bill C-150) Many will argue that these events are not the origins of the Queer rights movement as many strides were made prior to 1969 and the Stonewall riot but this is defiantly an anniversary worth celebrating when the world finally took note and the fight for equality began on a global level. This film documents the work the Never Apart platform showcased in galleries and also follows folks in Toronto, Vancouver and New York city where World Pride and Stonewall 50 parades and protests took place.

Part of a series from Sabrina Ratté

An exploration of the founding of nature aquariums and the way that they reconnect people with the natural world.

The seer passes beneath branches, crosses fields, observes the quiet corners of creation. Bright and dark take turns showing their faces, a two-sided phantasm, one energy shape-shifting through time. The seer makes note, gleans eidolons.

"Rider" is an experimental documentary that follows a horseback rider as they prepare for a lesson. Cycling between old memories and present-day activities, the film reflects on ideas of the archive, disability and therapy.

T-Pose is an intervention at the meeting point of games, dance, and choreography. The work presents a critical and creative performance of the habitual, ritualized movements of video games. Beginning with various sets of stock animations for games (shooting, swinging a sword, punching, etc.), T-Pose then situates these movements in a continuously-developing, infinitely variable, ritualistic dance. The procedural, contingent nature of the dance allows for the creative ‘drift’ between the written score (the tropes and animations) and the ritualized performance which differs each time.

Theo Abellard and Modibo Keita are musicians from Montreal who’ve formed their own concert series and music venue. Their personal experiences in the music scene and within music institutions has led them to forming musical spaces for those of their community; taking the future of Montreal's music scene in their hands.

magic, magic, on the wall, press me short and press me tall in your service I would fall, cubicular or as a ball. - Lionel Ziprin

"Prairie Grizzly's Peneplain" is a meditation on various natural and manufactured landscapes in southern Saskatchewan. This region is part of an ancient Precambrian seabed rebounding from the last Ice Age which once had a dynamic range of wildlife, plants, and wetlands supporting various ancient cultures that flourished here for millennia. Up until the late 1800's the Prairie Grizzly thrived on the Canadian Prairies. The bears that managed to migrate further west to the Rocky Mountains faced a difficult transition, although they have managed to survive in their new homes. Along with the plains buffalo, the have become a presence in the past, a story from an other era.

Samwise and Stevie grew up with homelessness in BC and Nova Scotia. Ianos is a gender-queer Greek. Kwaku is a single father who came from extreme poverty and famine.

A beautiful 7-year-old girl Fuyao is devastated when her parents are arrested and thrown into prison for their faith. Bullied and humiliated, Fuyao refuses to be crushed by the gigantic repressive regime. She and her mom find extraordinary means to connect through the iron bars and grow together.

A deer attempts to get lost in the woods only to be confronted by what he was hoping to escape from.

In 2019, the “Sustainabiliteens” from Vancouver mobilized more than 150,000 people to march against climate destruction. The film gives insights into the teenagers’ everyday life which is determined not only by school, friends and families, but also by the climate crisis and activism. Taking things into their own hands gives them strength: “We are unstoppable, another world is possible.”

Josh Gofton Creation

Thinking he has found love, a young teenager sets out to murder his rival with a baseball bat.

Experimental from 2020

Made with great technical skill, this intimate exploration cleverly interweaves the past and present in order to shed light on the future.

Inspired by the writings of Donna J. Haraway, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Greg Egan, the work plunges us into a speculative future, where samples of then extinct plant species are preserved and displayed in a virtual archive room. Through editing and visual strategies, this archive room is sporadically transformed under the effect of interference caused by the memory emanating from the listed plants, revealing traces of a past that continues to haunt the place. Floralia is a simulation of ecosystems born from the fusion of technology and organic matter, where past and future coexist in a perpetual tension of the present.

"'The Last Weekend of Summer' is a fragmented film exploring the last pieces of warmth and summer as we transition into the fall and winter. The quick cuts provide clips of a weekend spent in nature and enjoying the end of a season." (the8fest)

It's New Year's Eve in Tijuana, Mexico. Wood and Colonel are busy making Soup Joumou to celebrate Haitian Independence Day with their friends at the "Trap House". As their cooking progresses, memories of the perilous journey that brought them to the US/Mexico border two years ago resurface. From Haiti to Brasil and through nine other South and Central-American countries, here they are, sandwiched between their dream of a musical career in the US and a US president who calls Haiti a shit hole and believes all Haitians have AIDS.

“The Landscape is a film on moving, being held and being placed in places and in between places. There is no explanation on the story behind it. There is no deeper thought or symbolism behind it. Like driving, listening to the music and looking at the landscape. All passes by”. – KG

Eve is a sheep who lives a simple life. But one day, she is abducted and put into a laboratory in which she undergoes training to maker her “civilized." The training confuses her at first, but she begins to get the hang of it. However, her training culminated in a final test: is she willing to kill a wild animal?

"What Came Before" is a short experimental documentary filmed within Mount Pleasant and Chinatown on unceded Coast Salish Territories, also known as Vancouver, BC. Jae Lew and Caroline So Jung Lee created double exposures on a single 16mm roll, exploring the diversity of Asian experiences and transformations made visible through the natural world.