Discoveries from Canada World Cinema

The surprise victory of the Paris Crew, a group of unheralded Canadian rowers, at the 1867 World Championships.

An aging actress experiencing early signs of Alzheimer's meets a suicidal young doctor who doesn't want to be a doctor.

To date, more than a hundred young men from the South Asian community have died in gang-related violence in Metro Vancouver. Gangs are a reality of urban life, yet behind the body count and the headlines, a far different battle is being waged. Educators and parents are taking action against gang violence. Director Baljit Sangra's documentary Warrior Boyz takes an unflinching look at the root causes of gang violence, and offers real solutions and a hard-fought hope for the future.

Five boys and five girls ages 13 to 19 live on a farm for ten weeks, to be filmed, and to see what might emerge for each of them personally.

A lonely hairdresser watches the title sequence of "That Cold Day in the Park" then visits a local park to invite a down-and-out skinhead to his apartment. He draws the silent man a bath and talks to him as he soaks. He locks his guest in a bedroom. Next day, the skinhead leaves through the window and visits his sister, who's making a film called "Sisters of the SLA." He helps with a screen-test. The hairdresser has dreams and fantasies involving the skinhead, the skinhead returns to visit him, and then the filmmaker pays a call on the two men, exposing her brother as faking his silence and pretending a lack of sexual interest. Fantasies can come true.

A polite young man transforms into a jerkish monster and runs amok in the office he works at.

Haunted by nightmares and visions, Vera abandons her life in Iceland to chase the ghost of her disappeared father to the coast of Newfoundland. After settling in a remote fishing village, she finds herself drawn to Jack, a seal hunter leaving town with his failing boat and superstitious crew.

Post-Human is a scifi proof-of-concept short based on the award-winning and bestselling series of novels by David Simpson. Amazingly, filmed over just three hours by a crew of three, the short depicts the opening of Post-Human, drawing back the curtain on the Post-Human world and letting viewers see the world and characters they've only been able to imagine previously. You'll get a taste of a world where everyone is immortal, have onboard mental "mind's eye" computers, nanotechnology can make your every dream a reality, and thanks to the magnetic targeted fusion implants every post-human has, everyone can fly (and yep, there's flying in this short!) But there's a dark side to this brave new world, including the fact that every post-human is monitored from the inside out, and the one artificial superintelligence running the show might be about to make its first big mistake.

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.

Animation created and premiered during the Ottawa International Animation Festival in 1998 at the National Gallery of Canada

Faced with a future of chair-xercise and spoon-fed pudding, nursing home friends Nora and Edna attempt to break out of the 'fox farm' and find a life worth sticking around for.

A 2000's Romeo and Juliet in small town Ontario, where love does not win, but surviving players grow up to accept themselves as members of the LGBTQ+ community.

This short documentary film is a fascinating portrait of urban and rural Quebec in the late 1960s, as the province entered modernity. The collective work produced for the Quebec Ministry of Industry and Commerce calls on several major Quebec figures.

Orson Welles talks fantasy and magic in this short Vienna travelogue.

Facing a long winter of lockdown and a stubborn bout of writer’s block, filmmaker Eric reluctantly agrees to get a dog with his girlfriend, Allie. After plenty of research and negotiation, Milly arrives—a traumatized rescue from the Dominican Republic.

Business, from father to son. During a police search that disturbs his family's peace, Nico Allouch discovers the dark side of his father, Sylvain, a mysterious businessman with dubious activities. Against the wishes of his father, who refuses to let him follow in his footsteps, Nico launches his own clandestine business.

This short animation tells the story of Saoussan, a young girl struggling to adjust to life in Canada after being uprooted from her wartorn homeland. She has come to seek a quieter and safer life, although memories of war and death linger, memories that are awakened when the children at her new school prepare for a scary Halloween. From Far Away speaks to the power within us all to adapt like Saoussan and to welcome a newcomer.

Stage: The Culinary Internship follows a group of interns during a nine month apprenticeship at one of the best restaurants in the world, Mugaritz. While the restaurant’s notorious avant-garde cuisine and creative working environment elevates these young hopefuls to think outside the confines of a kitchen, the extremely high standards prove to be mentally and physically exhausting. Ultimately, not everyone can handle the heat.

Edgar is living in the shadow of his wife's sudden death. Haunted by vivid hallucinations and a faceless city threatening to swallow him whole, Edgar's world begins to unravel as his nightmares become a reality and Edgar is left with a choice: prison or paradise.

In a World that stops for no one, a ruthless businessman stumbles upon the power to control time, but as his ambition grows, he faces a choice between success and losing everything that truly matters, including love.

An idyllic picnic turns dangerous, forcing a kidnapped woman to struggle with her delusional ex-lover in a surreal exploration of love, obsession, and letting go.

In a dark forest, a soul caresses itself with feathers. And the birds fly away.

Office drone Maria Barbizan leads what looks like a meaningless life. She’s lonely, and she doesn’t really exist, at her job or within her family. One day, she does everything we’ve all dreamed of – she throws her purse and old life in the trash, and joins an enigmatic contest to win... a car. Locked in a room with four strangers, each more eccentric than the next, she must go through a series of challenges – a “competition to probe the very essence of mind-body articulation”, lead by Homunculus, an intriguing and curious host.

After five years of travelling abroad, Alex arrives back in Montreal. All he has with him are a back-pack and a slip of paper with an ex-girlfriend's address scrawled on it.

Arthur Lipsett's first film is an avant-garde blend of photography and sound. It looks behind the business-as-usual face we put on life and shows anxieties we want to forget. It is made of dozens of pictures that seem familiar, with fragments of speech heard in passing and, between times, a voice saying, "Very nice, very nice." The film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film.

AT SEA is a visceral and poetic short film that blends docu-style realism with narrative fiction, following a group of faceless sailors navigating the unpredictable seas of Greece. Through the fragmented memories of an unreliable narrator, the film weaves together a non-linear story that shifts in mood with each chapter, offering a fresh perspective on the sea. Based on true events… almost.

A killer disposing of her victim is caught off guard when a drone witnesses the burial. She must chase down the drone, and its pilot, to prevent her secret ever leaving the scene of the crime.

A young Quebecois artist named Madeleine, who lives in Vancouver during the hippie counter revolution, is trying to find herself. She meets some interesting characters that help her through her journey.

An ageing teacher confined to a hospital for the criminally insane reveals the sinister plot that provoked her violent actions.

An experimental film shot in 1978 wherein the director skateboards down one of the highest mountain passes in the Andes.

Molly has mysterious dreams that feel like they are really happening. Meanwhile her path keeps crossing with an obviously distraught, disturbed woman. Molly soon comes to realize her dreams and the woman are connected.

The film stars Tim Henry as Billie Joyce, a gay and transvestite former musician who has been institutionalized in an asylum due to mental illness. Inheriting the smalltown hotel formerly owned by his deceased father, he returns home intending to sell the hotel to real estate developer Oscar Kidd (Robert A. Silverman), but soon finds himself in the position of defending the rights of the hotel's staff against Kidd's renovation plans.

Samadhi Part 2 (It's not what you think) is the second installment of a series of films exploring Samadhi, an ancient Sanskrit word which points toward the mystical or transcendent union that is at the root of all spirituality and self inquiry.

The military has been testing a new Virtual Reality fighting simulator, but testing is abruptly canceled when a soldier loses his life during the action. Its creator, Dr. Vincent MacIntyre, goes underground to continue developing the device, until detective Justin Blake and his partner Stone break into the syndicate to stop them. However, they are too late, and the new simulator is even deadlier than the first!

A behind-the-scenes look at the making of Hard Core Logo (1995).

An introduction to the employment picture in Canada in the late 1950s, designed to inform potential immigrants of job opportunities existing for women. The film reviews many fields of work in which women are engaged, ranging from the highly specialized to the unskilled, and shows much of it being performed by women who have come to Canada from many different lands. Placement services and information services established to help newly arrived immigrants are shown in operation. Viewed from a modern perspective, the greater part of the film accepts as normal the waste of women's talents in repetitive or service jobs while elevating this work to the status of a career. Currently distributed only in 13-minute abridged form.

An examination of the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women, the film explores the reasons why Indigenous women are uniquely vulnerable to violence by juxtaposing the stories of some missing or murdered women with the personal testimonies of women who are doing activism on the issue and women who have personally survived incidents of violence.

"In the summer of 2008 my father butted heads with hospital bureaucracy. Using found footage loops, mechanized sounds and photograms, EDITORIAL tells the story of redundancy, repetition and fighting for your life." Steven Woloshen

On July 10, 1978, Eric Wilson - a 19-year from Ottawa and student at Tufts University - left home to drive to a summer college course in Colorado. When he went missing four days afterward in Nebraska, his family tried to persuade local and U.S. police that he wasn't simply a runaway and hadn't simply forgotten to call home. The program examines the lengths to which they had to go to find out what happened to Eric, and the byzantine nature of the legal system which seemed less interested in pursuing justice than in avoiding the expenses involved in the investigation and potential trials. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive, in partnership with Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, in 2007.

When morning arrives in Society of Clothes, shirts and pants step outside the closet, transforming into living entities. In the world of the film, everyone exists solely as clothes, wandering into the streets bodiless and faceless. But the routine of this strange place is disrupted one day when a human child with flesh and bones appears, turning their everyday existence upside down.

In 1945, Great Britain and the United States organized a bombing raid that devastated the ancient city of Dresden. This short documentary returns exactly 40 years after its destruction and celebrates its renaissance with the re-opening of one of the most beautiful opera houses in Europe. One guest at this gala was the Canadian navigator of one of the bomber planes, returning to Dresden on a mission of peace that brought him face-to-face with the people who were once his enemies.

Pretty Bloody: The Women of Horror is a television documentary film that premiered on the Canadian cable network Space on February 25, 2009. The hour-long documentary examines the experiences, motivations and impact of the increasing number of women engaged in horror fiction, with producers Donna Davies and Kimberlee McTaggart of Canada's Sorcery Films interviewing actresses, film directors, writers, critics and academics. The documentary was filmed in Toronto, Canada; and in Los Angeles, California and New York City, New York in the US.

A clever parrot becomes the sole witness to a violent murder and may hold the answers when it mimics the victim's final words.

A dark drama-comedy about the honest story of Martin Crimp, a young detective, whose fears of rejection manifest into a gigantic menacing owl that prevents him from finding true love.

Françoise is determined to help her friend Lucie discover sexual fulfillment, whom she considers to be stuck in a marital rut with Henri, her failing husband. So she introduces her to a friend, Pierre, who soon becomes her lover. Pierre even proposes to Lucie to go with him to Nice, where he says he has a villa.

Behind closed doors, cliques of the world's most powerful men form societies so secret and controversial that their very names spark fear in our hearts and minds: the Freemasons, the Illuminati, Skull and Bones. What are the intentions of these secret societies? Are the members of these brotherhoods the innocent victims of mudslinging conspiracy theorists or are they untouchable elitists who control the world?

Kelly is a Métis man without treaty or hunting rights, struggling to sustain his traditional life. His daughter Theresa longs for a red dress from France that she believes will give her power and strength, as the bear claw once did for her great-grandfather Muskwa. When Theresa escapes an assault and Kelly turns his back on his daughter, he realizes that he must reconnect with his culture in order to make things right. Today, the red dress is a powerful symbol recognizing over 1000 missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada.

A short, educational animation about the history of fonts and typography. In a paper cutout stop-motion style, it begins with Gutenberg's creation of the first typeface, travels through the innovations of Jenson, Caslon, and Bodoni, to the modern creation of Futura and the democratization of fonts in the digital age. A charming, engaging film about a technology that is all around us, but few people know much about.

Twelve severed feet in running shoes found on the shores of Western Canada have baffled Police. A videotape is leaked anonymously from the authorities. This paranormal thriller may solve the mystery of the severed feet.

Inspired by true events, a 14 year-old boy is accused of raping and murdering a little girl

A short film following one woman's fantasy during a catering shift from hell.

In the early 1970s, a group of young volunteers, the Free Youth Clinic of Winnipeg, operated a "crisis bus" to rescue young people experiencing bad drug trips, usually from LSD.

A short screwball film that pokes fun at the horrors that come along with pregnancy. A woman starts exhibiting bizarre pregnancy symptoms at a baby shower.

After the death of his wife, a South Asian father and his son begin seeing a shadow around the walls of their home, who the son believes to be his mother.

Kyle is a budding writer who works as a frontline worker during the early days of the pandemic. At first he is able to weather the storm with his partner Jess, but as the pandemic grinds on, and Kyle’s mental health begins to decline, his relationship starts to come under increasing stress.

A woman's vehicle is missing from a downtown parking garage. While investigating, two security guards discover a glitch between life and death.