Discover Movies

In this first of Lulu Keating's films, she animates photos she's accumulated that celebrate her extroverted spirit.

Filmed in 1987, this documentary chronicles the journey of Via Rail's The Canadian as it makes its way across Canada.

The director puns on the then emerging genre of "rock videos," by bringing real rocks to life under the animation camera.

This installment in the Canada Vignettes series depicts the Canadian Forces Air Demonstration Aerobatics team at work.

Five men work together in a communal effort to build a skiff on Ile-aux-Coudres, an island in the St. Lawrence River. It is built in a traditional fashion, all the more remarkable because no blueprint is used. The film does not merely record a building tradition, it reveals the character of the craftsmen, who are influenced by a pre-industrial way of life underscored by spontaneity and wit.

Made in collaboration with the Inuit Tungavingat Nunamini, this film focuses on those dissident members of the Inuit community who rejected the agreement signed on November 11, 1975, between the Northern Quebec Inuit Association, the Québec and federal governments, the James Bay Energy Corporation, the James Bay Development Corporation, Hydro-Québec and the Grand Council of the Crees, which took away Native rights to a territory of almost one million square kilometres. By their words and actions, the dissident Inuit of Povungnituk, Ivujivik and Sugluk express their strong desire to retain their land and their traditions. The filmmakers go into their homes, on the ice and the sea to record first-hand the lives of these northern people.

Documentary about the ten days the director spent in Moscow, during the 1986 Moscow Youth Festival, as kind of a gay delegate.

Based on the Lewis Carol nonsense poem "Jabberwocky," this three-minute animation brings to life the fearsome Jabberwock, the Jub-Jub bird, and other fanciful creatures. Hand-coloured still photographs and cell drawings lend a storybook quality to this imaginative fairy-tale

An army of killer scorpions terrorize a small town.

A musician plays a violin to a black dog, a white horse, a sheep, lamb and chickens in a barn yard while it is raining at a small farm yard in Clam Harbour, Nova Scotia. The handheld camera wanders, documenting the violin player and the animal audience.

Thanksgiving dinner, from the turkey's point of view.

It is the story of a creature living on another planet and dreaming that he flies across space like a bird and arrives on Earth. Typical scenes are set in Paris and New York. Others show natural scenes such as ocean, trees, and birds.

A 17-year-old girl refuses medical treatment that will prolong her life due to religious convictions.

An account of the mining and refining of uranium showing how the development of energy from uranium is providing much of the world’s current needs. The film looks at the manufacturing of the uranium fuel used in CANDU lead reactors and explains the fission process, the fueling of reactors and the management of radioactive waste.

The film examines the relationships of single fathers with their children after separation or divorce.

A biographical documentary about the actor Long Lance.

"I bought a children's fishing set and inside there was a red fish. Using real-time analog with digital montage, I created this video just as I would practice my favourite hobby : fishing. A dense work, yet one which is full of nuances." Rick Raxlen

An amusing and clever exploration of an artist's struggle to find his own style and vision, despite disapproval of that vision from people in power.

The second film of the series Narratives of Egypt (1984-87). In the form of the letter ‘X’ is a signature – a filmic equivalent of Cartmell’s name (which is reduced by exhaustive transcription to a simple X). X is the mark of those who cannot write, or who do not know their own names. Photographed over time against a backdrop of the Canadian Shield, X shows Cartmell’s son Sam running in slow motion towards the camera, and, in the film’s second half, away from it. The shape/structure of the movie is chiasmatic, part of the old avant-garde dream of creating movies that could be run backwards and forwards. The movie is in two parts that form an X.

A film-opera divided into nine segments, Au pays de Zom tells a day in the life of Mister Zom, a capitalist infatuated with his own person, whose conformism is only matched by his artistic velleity. A thematic sequel to his movie filmed with Mexican peasants, here Groulx asks, by making a business man sing, a second question on happiness: this time about the ones for whom happiness is linked with the possession of overabundance. He delivers, by developing the theatrical dimension with great emphasis, a social pamphlet with a strong satirical charge that he himself qualified as a "neo-surrealist fantasy".

Identifying himself intimately with serial killer John Wayne Gacy, the director uses the camera to take hold of the actors, constructing fantasies that lead them to believe they are the victims in a film yet to be made. The young men, aged 19 to 26, speak from the heart about love and prostitution. Their search leads us into another world. Is this the world of John Wayne Gacy?

This fast-paced and entertaining animated film is about water and the demands placed on our waterways by agriculture, industry, and urban life. An army of droplets, led by The Chief, shows what happens to water from the time it falls as rain until it reaches its destination.

The sensations, moods and passages of grief are explored in "The Wake", which uses emotionally evocative landscapes and poetic text to extract a poignant beauty from the depths of human trauma.

This short documentary is an ode to the thrills and excitement of cycling. Including highlights from the 1976 Olympics and the 1978 Commonwealth Games, the film features some of the world's best cyclists and their coaches, in training and in competition.

"For those who came of age in the 1960s and 70s, glamour received its highest expression in fashion magazines like Vogue, where the representation of lives and those who lived them achieved perfection on every page. Prime Cuts is a work premised on the notion that the lives of magazine models are real (much like another Vancouver artist, Ken Lum, who as a child believed that the bedroom suites in the furniture store flyers that landed on his doorstep were real bedrooms). In exploring the lives of models (some of whom the Mainstreeters worked with through commercial projects), Prime Cuts does not so much imagine what these models get up to both before and after the lights, camera and action of the photo shoot casts them in amber, but extends the fantasy." – Allison Collins & Michael Turner, Mainstreeters: Taking Advantage, 1972-1982, Satellite Gallery, 2015

This feature documentary uses music to reveal the many faces of jazz, New Orleans style. Colourful and alive with music, the film captures the street life and traditions of this vibrant city and explores the roots of the music that springs from the soul of the African-American community.

Newfoundland writer Harold Horwood has been called many things, but his own opinion of himself is undiminished. A former union organizer, politician in the Smallwood government, muckraking journalist, and founder of a counterculture "free school" in the 1960s, he is also an award-winning author whose regional base has not lessened his national stature.

This documentary short is a portrait of Canadian photographer William Notman. Photography was still in its infancy when he opened his first studio in Montreal in the late 1850s. He rapidly turned his art, and a budding technology, into a highly successful business. Within 5 years he was appointed Photographer to the Queen. Not content with doing mere portraiture, he saw photography as a means of documenting history. With the use of props in his studio, composite photographs, and calling on his background as a trained artist, Notman immortalized the people and places of Canada.

A Short Film by Jean Marc Larivière

Dancing Around the Table: Part Two charts the battle to enshrine Indigenous rights in the Canadian Constitution, capturing a key moment in Canada’s history from the perspective of Indigenous negotiators. The 1985 conference, chaired by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, was the fourth and final meeting to determine an amendment to Indigenous rights as defined in the Constitution. The provincial premiers again refuse to reach an agreement with the First Nations, Metis and Inuit leaders, even though the majority of Canadians supported the inclusion of Indigenous rights to self-government. Director Bulbulian captures the pride and determination of Indigenous leaders and community members who refuse to back down on this historic opportunity to enshrine their rights, and the arrogance of the First Ministers who are fighting to keep power within the federal and provincial governments.

A professor arrives in Montreal to give a lecture about his country. One by one, he justifies the accusations of human rights violations in Chile in a speech that gradually loses its coherence.

Experimental short film by Josephine Massarella

An intimate portrait of Jack Chambers, a major figure in the Canadian cultural landscape. This lyrical film includes the full range of his work from the age of thirteen until his death. The story is told in Chambers' own words through narration, and balanced by interviews with people who were close to Chambers at different times in his life.

Funded through the Canada Council, this new media video, formatted on a Targa computer program, was one of several works created though the New Tools for Imaging project at CFAT. This animation of an amoeba who gains art star status, results in a new world order.

In this open-ended drama, a union leader is confronted with the dilemma of whether to agree to the solution to his company's waste-disposal problem. A clean-up would mean the loss of jobs for many of his fellow employees. He must decide between jobs for his workers and a safer, cleaner environment.

In the fall of 1986, Richard Fung made his first visit to his father's birthplace, a village in southern Guangdong, China. This experimental documentary examines the way children of immigrants relate to the land of their parents, and focuses on the ongoing subjective construction of history and memory. The Way to My Father's Village juxtaposes the son's search for his own historical roots, and his father's avoidance of his cultural heritage.

This film tells the bittersweet story of strongman and magician Mike Swistun who, for thirty days in 1923, was the strongman with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Born in Olha, Manitoba, Swistun was a Ukrainian farm boy, who, for a short moment in time, achieved fame and fortune only to lose it. Narrated by the Ukrainian Hollywood actor Jack Palance, this film won the prestigious Genie Award.

A short video in three acts that tells the story of an encounter between three men. Possibility, certainty and reality. The place: between Montreal and the Laurentians in the autumn of 1984. The misty and damp atmosphere of late November. The narration is singed by Yves Dionne.

Lac La Croix First Nation is a small community located on the Canada-US boundary waters. It is surrounded by thousands of square miles of wilderness parkland - Quetico Park in Ontario and Superior National Forest in upstate Minnesota. The film is a self-portrait of a Northwestern Ontario First Nation, it's daily life and struggle for existence. When the parks were formed, ancestors were kicked out of their traditional lands within Quetico Park, enduring terrible hardships and upheaval. Elders speak of these treaty violations. The use of small motorboats to guide sports fishermen on a few isolated lakes is resisted by those who want an uninterrupted canoe-only wilderness park experience for tourists. The ironies are not lost on the guides, Elders and community members who tell Lac La Croix's story with grace, wit and lots of original music.

This animated short tells the story of a young boy who finds an injured snow goose and nurses it back to health. Constant companions through the sun-filled days of summer, the two sadly separate in the fall when the bird obeys the call to join its flock for the annual flight south. Will the friendship endure?

A portrait of Inuit hunter and artist Lypa Pitsiulak, who decided to return to the land several years ago. His goal was to rediscover his culture, teach his family survival skills in the harsh Arctic environment, and pull himself and his family away from the negative influences of white culture. The film portrays his lifestyle, his love for his family, and some of the sources of his artistic inspiration. It also highlights his beautiful prints and sculptures, with their fantastic interweaving of figures from the animal, spirit and human worlds.

Two Filipino couples in Canada as political refugees, the Ordonez and the Yuitungs, return to the Philippines of Cory Aquino.

This is a documentary record of the fight for aboriginal title to the land that the Temagami Anishnabai have been living on for thousands of years. The band fought the reservation system in court for 20 years demonstrating that their ancestors have lived in this territory and did not sign any treaty with the British government (at the time) to surrender their land in the Robinson-Huron Treaty of 1850.

Animated short that explores the different meanings of "coming out", "being out" and "going out"; all until the metaphorical train of Life rides away from us viewers.

The structure of the film alternates between looped, processed stock TV imagery and a blank, static blue screen. This formal motif - a blank frame or screen onto which the artist projects imagery which expresses inner emotions and anxieties - is a motif which recurs throughout Rimmer's filmic oeuvre. As Seen on TV is a moving film which conveys a deep-seated human experience.

A vignette about a 1912 fly-swatting contest organized by The Toronto Daily Star to draw attention to the danger posed to public health by flies. Through archival photographs and newspaper headlines the highlights of the contest are reviewed in a light, humorous manner. The winner, a determined young lady named Beatrice White, killed over 500 000 flies during the six-week contest and was dubbed the "Angel of Death" by the paper.

Although Seated Figures is characteristically confined by a specific placement of the camera — in this case, fixed to the rear of a pickup truck and aimed at the ground — the result is one of Snow's most visually compelling films. As Snow drives the truck over all kinds of terrain — he has offhandedly described the film as a "history of roads" — we see a variety of textures flowing in front of the camera as this road movie unfolds: asphalt, gravel, dirt roads, sand, grass, flowers and shallow creeks. The imagery moves between abstraction and representation as different travelling speeds affect the legibility of the visuals, and as manmade surfaces give way to the beautifully variegated patterning of nature.

The tape is about the way AIDS has been represented by medical journalism in particular and the dominant media in general. Contemporary medical research is destroying a movement that the gay liberation movement has built up, that is an autonomous, proud, homoerotic body, and is reconstructing that body as a pathological and morbid body that shows symptoms of disease.

This animated short features Leonard, a 6-year-old boy with the unusual hobby of collecting sounds. Transforming household noises around him into exciting fantasies, he creates an adventure story for his older brother in which knights chase away monsters and perform other daring deeds.

Mining and oil industry impacts within Indigenous local economies in Canada's northern territories.

Do You Accept the Charges? focuses on Quebec filmmaker Robert Morin. We are presented with extracts of Morin's work and personal interviews given over a two-year period. We gain insight into his ability to tell a story, his irony and his approach to documentary. A fascinating look at the artist's philosophy, both on and off the set.