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Autism Speaks Canada remains committed to building inclusive communities where autistic Canadians can reach their full potential. We are excited to share “Life on The Spectrum by Autism Speaks Canada” with you today. In this 20 minute documentary, we share lived experiences of autistic Canadians and their families, from coast to coast to coast, to increase understanding and acceptance of people with autism. First, we start with the land acknowledgement and then visit our autistic friends and their families across Canada. Join us on this journey to explore “Life on the Spectrum”.

Buddy, an old stray cat in Toronto, had managed to conquer a small territory of his own in the center of the city. The filmmaker met Buddy’s gaze every time she went out. She befriended her neighbor and captured his last autumn with her old 35mm hand cranked movie camera. Delight at Robert St. is a visual poem about the everyday moments that shape our lives.

A working-class Punjabi immigrant couple get the chance to turn the tables on those who’ve wronged and harassed them, in this deftly handled and keenly felt drama by Toronto’s Gurjeet Kaur Bassi.

Usagi and Yosuke are students at the same school and secretly love each other. What they don't know is that they are part of opposing street gangs who are on a mission to eliminate the other.

A 26-year-old man becomes gravely ill and died of an unknown disease. He was clearly hexed: it’s October 1980 and we are in Haïti. Meanwhile, in Reagan's country, health authorities have decided that Haitians, Homosexuals, Hemophiliacs and Heroin users are to be part of the 4H club whose members are dying in New York City, San Francisco, and Toronto. Why put the Haitians in a separate group?

A quirky and lovable fisherman fights to keep his livelihood through years of illness.

A young woman, struggling with anxiety and ADHD, reveals how she finds inner peace through the experience of cooking.

A rumination on the Toronto-based artist and video maker Lloyd Wong whose unfinished tapes from the early '90s Chan collages together.

The Still Image and the Labour Process: An Agitka is an experimental short film made in the style of a silent Soviet agitational-propaganda short (agitka). In proper Soviet, or perhaps Vertovian, fashion, it argues through intertitles and montage that the cinema is a weapon for destroying the commodifying effects of still photography.

Violet Gave Willingly immerses us in the colourful and tactile studio and inner life of textile artist Deborah Dumka. An unflinchingly intimate mother–daughter conversation, the film lays bare the continuum and legacy of gender-based discrimination, sexism and sexual violence.

When David reveals details of his past life as a ballet dancer to his son, questions immediately emerge: Why had his father never told him about being a dancer? Why had he waited until he was 70 years old, and after rejecting Jamie’s coming out as a teenager, to tell his son about about his own sexual fluidity? With words of encouragement from legendary ballet dancer Evelyn Hart, who dances a cameo in the film, David decides he wants to start dancing again, and he wants his story told.

After meeting on a dating app, Tom and John decide to give each other a chance to be more than just two anonymous bodies, as they take a walk in the snowy Montreal winter. Even though John does not speak nor French, nor English, the two start bonding. But the curfew is just around the corner.

Life feels more like a complicated game of snakes and ladders than a straight line.

Four friends find themselves with varying gifts in extra-sensory perception. They face the struggles of being young adults with very secret and powerful abilities that they cannot tell anyone.

In a quiet residential neighbourhood, the tension between domestic, wild and work animals is caught on home security camera, recorded through windows and souvenired in old postcards. A found-footage piece made as a reaction to the internet's obsession with pets, The Kittens' Tea Party allegorizes speciesism. [ & alludes to home invasion fear, nature’s revenge, settler colonialism ]

The Klabona Keepers is an intimate portrait of the dynamic Indigenous community that succeeded in protecting the Sacred Headwaters, known as the Klabona, from industrial activities. Spanning 15 years of matriarch-led resistance, a small group of determined elders in the village of Iskut heal from the wounds of colonization to push back against law enforcement, government, and some of the world’s largest multinational companies. Nestled between scenes of stand-offs and blockades, land defenders reflect on how their history of forced displacement, residential schools, and trauma strengthened their resolve to protect the very land that was so essential to their healing journey.

This rhythmic fusion of screen-in-screen, montage, animation and traditional documentary techniques paints a playful portrait of Sarah Thawer, the ass-kicking drummer brought to you by the forces of intergenerational feminism and international music.

The OIAF's signal film uses a technique the director is calling "A Dopey Photo Slop 2.0". Viviane Labelle created the titles using chromatography and Andrew Zukerman created the electroacoustic score.

An alternative film confronting constructs that subliminally shape our view of gender.

An (almost) invisible protagonist enters a restaurant and orders pea soup.

On a fridgid December night, a fire breaks out in an apartmanst building. Standing out in the cold, a young man watches as the inhabitants huddle together, plotting and scheming their revenge.

A man and a woman take the wheel of a good old car, but their destination is quite different.

Movie producer and crime boss, John Barry, reeks havoc on Mountain City. It's up to Captain Phantom and company to put an end to things.

A boy searches for a place with his friends while carrying a blue bag.

Tells the struggles of Haku, a high school student who often deals with dysphoria: the uniform she was given doesn't always correspond to who she really is. Her sister Yuu comes to the rescue so that Haku can freely live her authentic life. This is a story of love and acceptance.

A tribute to an astonishing legacy and a rallying cry for a new generation, director Sara Elgamal’s Queen Bee brings the remarkable work of broadcaster, actor, and thinker Dr. Rita Shelton Deverell into focus.

Raven, a high school senior, has a split life of a student and a magical girl. Her best friends are her classmates, Berrycream Frosting and Dark Shi. This year, a school down the road blew up and its students had to transfer to her school, bringing many new faces to their lives with new potential friendships to form. Raven's biggest goal is to have the most perfect school year for herself. Unfortunately, someone with more sinister motives has her eyes on her, with the wish to ensure they get the best school experience instead.

the story of young teenagers in Québec City as they try to save their youth community centre

A young man prepares to enter the next stage of his life as the new lead guitarist of the historic rock band Rush.

Moreno Bueno is an artist whose track record has combined sound and visual experimentation around themes such as the body, movement and analogue processes. She has set herself the task of converting images projected through 16 mm into sounds by using photosensitive microphones. The resulting artwork is a kind of diary of Moreno Bueno’s stay in Toronto, which she produced using the colours and shapes found in her wanderings around the city. She also plays with double exposures, expired emulsions, colour filters and different methods for developing by hand, gradually modifying the images (via a random, open procedure) in a symphony of a city that truly sounds, by directly translating its projected images. It is an experiment that involved creating microphones that she herself describes as “photophonotransistors”. Rather than microphones, they are instruments that use images instead of strings or wind to create sound.

Abstract organic drawings, wandering flocks of clouds and the surging sea give the “Impromptu opus 70” piano piece a visual body which refuses to take on a fixed form or pause. “Remous” embraces the undulations of Jacques Hétu’s erratic composition, twists perspectives and makes individual notes shimmer as brief reflections of light on the surfaces of deep darkness.

In Post-Civil War America, two Confederate officers turned wanted bandits seek help from a Union soldier to dig up a coffin full of gold in hopes of changing their collective fates.

Unveils the nuances of Asian queerness at a crossroads with upbringing, kinship, desire, and disclosure, juxtaposing the complexities in which identity and community are kept private, shared, experienced and misunderstood.

An inventive little penguin makes many attempts to get his mother’s attention.

On September 7, 2012, Ashley MacDonald was sexually assaulted. In this powerful first time film, she talks to strangers about what that same day looked like in their own lives. What were they doing? What happened to them? The result is a documentary about processing trauma, and the power of openness and connection to help us heal.

Love punch love.

A day in the life of a spoon takes a dramatic turn as the common kitchen utensil becomes the key catalyst of a prison escape that embodies the resilient spirit of the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Presented through an abstracted perspective and visual storytelling style, this poetic short takes the liberatory ideals of the now infamous Gilboa prison escape and generalizes them onto a much more encompassing demographic: freedom defenders worldwide.

At the end of the shift, the cook of a small snack bar in the lower town receives a weekly visit from his potato delivery boy. But an error in the order will trigger a gastronomic and passionate encounter.

A diverse team of volunteer paramedics crosses the ethnic and religious divide to respond to the sick and injured in densely populated Tel Aviv.

Ghostly, eerily still bodies linger on a spectral subway platform, observed from a moving train.

A lonely man and his dog flee an inevitable end.

A Grindhouse style trailer for a movie so terrifying, you'll be running home to mama. Nothing can prepare you for "Werewolf Babysitter".

An intimate look into the lives of paediatric cannabis patients and the physician who had to fight to save her own son.

A little virgin loser breaks his bones because he’s fat

Borrowing its title from an interview with American artist Michael Asher, this film explores the tactile and even sensual qualities of analog magnetic tape recording and sound. The footage is composed of detailed close-ups of the reel-to-reel recorder as it plays back a song from Steve Bates’ latest release, All The Things That Happen (Constellation Records). The introduction plays back an old country & western song that was on one of the tape reels acquired with the recorder from the family of a deceased gentleman living in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Once the video shoot was complete, the reel never worked again.

Traditionally feminine materials and processes—nail polish, glitter, hand-painting—convert cinematic wilderness spaces, and the filmstrip itself, into representations of girlhood.

A passenger traveling alone on a train is haunted by something decaying just beyond her sight, as well as visions of her past sins.

A clown struggles to accept the inevitable demise of his balloon animals but gains a new perspective on life thanks to those around him.

At the intersection between animation, ceramics, film, as well as printmaking, Honeydew, Darling is employing an interdisciplinary approach to explore the transient relationship between time and identity as it relates to queerness.

A young woman escapes into a fantasy world where she imagines what life would have been like if she never left her birth country. Faced with who she wants to be, she must come to terms with the in-between.

Molding, stretching, squashing, bending, breaking, ripping, and tearing, a sculptor toils away attempting to shape raw material into the perfect form.

What to do in case of pocket dimension emergence. Don't let the mirror people get you.

While driving through the desert at night, a young woman finds herself in a valley of oddly shaped trees.