Discoveries from Canada World Cinema

Three teenagers form an unlikely bond on a road trip to nowhere in a wide open field behind a women's shelter.

Mona, a failed writer, carves out a life of isolation while caring for her ailing Sikh father but when he has a debilitating stroke her three successful siblings show up on her doorstep determined to take control of the situation.

Alex is an ambitious architect who is looking forward to celebrating Christmas at her mother’s beautiful Swiss Inn, until she finds out that her former best friend Beth who married Alex’s ex-boyfriend Jesse will also be there. Could a new romance with the Inn’s handsome manager and single-father Liam be the key to show Alex the magic of Christmas and open her up to forgiveness this holiday season?

A festival is a concentration of hope. Audiences hungering for something startingly new, famously familiar or just plain "good". Actors hoping their well-conceived sincerity and ritual entrances have that special glow. Press and critics poised to love or hate lucidly. And proud, desperate filmmakers looking for that little blessing on their latest self-projection. All squeezing together for a few days, in a few rooms wondering whether this will truly be the perfect place at the perfect time. Of course, it rarely is. Mostly it's just a collection of almosts. Delicious, shared almosts.

When a young female mouse makes a deal with the devil to become a rock star and learns the price, her boyfriend has to help her avoid damnation.

The story of an endangered Newfoundland community and the struggles of one man determined to resist its extinction.

Sébastien owns a book shop and has literary ambitions of his own. He befriends Joseph, an established novelist whose work he admires. But when Joseph is killed on his doorstep, Sébastien discovers a mysterious manuscript left behind. Sasha, Sébastien’s only child, witnesses Joseph’s death, and the effects run deep. She finds herself drawn to the author’s son Sidney, and starts a relationship with him. As the two grow closer, she discovers that her father is hiding something. Sidney, feeling betrayed by Sasha, threatens to expose Sébastien to get justice for his father’s memory. But his relentless pursuit for the truth leads him to uncover a tragic family secret from which he was protected… until now.

Young Willow discovers her magical heritage and is transported to Wickensburg in the 1600s, where she must stop Mr. Hexenmeister from seizing an ancient artifact.

An odd and intense middle aged Korean American man flirts with the idea of suicide because he believes he's failed his immigrant parents. He's disturbed by his increasingly vivid hallucinations of what his life could have been. So he pursues spirituality to calm himself, and in the process encounters others who are struggling in their own ways.

Ballet teacher Olivia gets more than she bargained for when she casts the talented Lily as the lead in the Christmas recital of The Nutcracker, and finds herself falling for Lily’s handsome firefighter father Michael. When a video of Michael practicing ballet with his daughter goes viral, Olivia sees how much dance really means to the community.

A man made of wood and a woman with secrets connect online, sharing truths that break them out of the cages of lies that have imprisoned them.

K.C. and Jo are two hardened female ex-cons who decide to build a marina on a lake in backwoods Texas to start a life for themselves, only to be hassled by the redneck locals who do not like outsiders, and that the lakeshore is their own regular hangout. But K.C. and Jo's worst troubles come from Junior, a slow-witted psycho redneck who gets the O.K. from his equally demented mother to kill the two.

The Chinese consider the lion a symbol of good luck, so it's a half-dragon, half-lion – a dralion – that is the symbol of the East-meets-West fusion of this performance in which 36 Chinese acrobats join the renowned Canadian troupe. Celebrating the four elements as represented in four colours – blue (air), green (water), red (fire) and ochre (earth) – Dralion combines ancient Chinese circus traditions with Cirque du Soleil's usual stunning elements: the techno-oriented single ring; the multicoloured lights and costumes; the music that mixes rock, New Age and various world influences (though not Chinese); and the madcap clowns that pull a victim out of the audience.

In GLOBAL METAL, directors Scot McFadyen and Sam Dunn set out to discover how the West's most maligned musical genre - heavy metal - has impacted the world's cultures beyond Europe and North America. The film follows metal fan and anthropologist Sam Dunn on a whirlwind journey through Asia, South America and the Middle East as he explores the underbelly of the world's emerging extreme music scenes; from Indonesian death metal to Chinese black metal to Iranian thrash metal. GLOBAL METAL reveals a worldwide community of metalheads who aren't just absorbing metal from the West - they're transforming it - creating a new form of cultural expression in societies dominated by conflict, corruption and mass-consumerism.

When his criminal father is diagnosed with dementia, a young thief plans a series of reckless heists in order to battle the disease and pay off a dangerous gambling debt.

After a few years absence, Evan unexpectedly returns one night to face his now-famous former bandmates. The surprise reunion is bittersweet, in this intimate depiction of the knotty complexities of relating to old friends after everything has changed.

It seems like everyone in Violet’s family dies at age 55. Her mother did, her father did, and as this movie opens Violet, played by Mary Walsh, learns that her brother, Leonard has also died. He too was 55, an age she is now fast approaching herself. His death causes Violet to begin an existential tailspin as her family gathers round. They are Andrew Younghusband who plays her son Carlos, a gay professor of languages who has returned from Montreal. Actor and director Barry Newhook plays Rex who is a musician and daughter Ramona is played by Susan Kent. As the movie unfolds it turns out that Violet has a lot to live for, including a romance with farm manager Rusty played by Peter MacNeill.

On January 8, 2020, Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 went down as it was leaving Iranian air space. All 176 people on board were killed, many of them Iranian Canadians. For weeks Iranian authorities vociferously denied responsibility, but foreign governments and agencies were certain the plane was shot down by Iranian military, a fact Iran’s government eventually admitted. There were no answers as to why the plane was fired on or even why it was allowed to take off, since hostilities had broken out in the region in preceding days.

After spending a decade in prison, Annie returns to her hometown, and tries to reconnect with her now-adolescent daughter Sophie.

There is no indication that this typical online flirtation between two strangers would turn into a case of shocking international intrigue. For months, Sandra in Montreal and Amina, a Syrian-American, bond romantically and intellectually. Encouraged by Sandra, Amina launches a blog called "A Gay Girl in Damascus," representing a marginalized voice in the Middle East on politics, religion, and sexuality. Rapidly garnering worldwide attention, Amina becomes something of a star blogger. But when Syria enters the Arab uprising of 2011, Sandra receives word that Amina has been kidnapped, and soon the search for Amina becomes a global concern and an even larger mystery to solve.

A dark, wryly funny film about a game show run by smug pseudo-intellectuals that awards money to the contestant with the most pathetic life. The "contestants" are unaware they're even playing the game: the show's producers infiltrate houses, install surveillance cameras and broadcast footage for viewers to judge in such existential categories as doubt, alienation and disillusionment. A biting critique of the culture of surveillance as entertainment.

The cod fishery off the east coast of Newfoundland was a way of life, the backbone of society -- until it collapsed. A review of the history leading up to the crisis and the subsequent call for a moratorium of the northwest Atlantic cod fishery.

In May 2006, filmmakers John Bolton and Errin Clutton were given eight days and eight hundred dollars to produce the made-for-television disaster film "Breakdown". Unfortunately, they spent the first seven days in casting. On the eighth day, they cut together "Breakdown" with the only footage they had - the video from the casting session. This is that film.

A soldier of fortune fights drug runners in Central America.

Set in a rural Québec village in the dead of winter, Jean-François, a single father, works at a deserted bowling alley at night and in a rundown motel during the day. His daughter, Julyvonne, never leaves their home. Jean-François isolates her in fear that contact with the outside world will scar her the way it has him.

Wes Merritt and his daughter Natalie (14) get more than they bargained for when they buy an old house that was formerly inhabited by the nice old Mrs. Ashboro and her pet cat, Margaret. When strange things start happening in the house, all fingers point to the presence of Margaret, who died the same day as Mrs. Ashboro. But why has she come back to haunt them?

The subversive masterpieces of Russian-Ukrainian writer Isaac Babel challenged the reality of life under rising totalitarianism, and led to his arrest and execution in 1940. In Finding Babel, Andrei Malaev-Babel confronts complex traces of a turbulent history that echo in his grandfather's writing and in the conflicts of today's Ukraine and Russia. Babel's fiction is woven into Andrei's search with ethereal animation that puts the viewer, like Babel's readers, between fantasy and reality.

Pop culture icon and country music legend Dolly Parton is known around the world as a singer, songwriter and actress. But to a new generation of children in the U.S., Canada and the U.K., she is simply The Book Lady.

A documentary based on former Playboy Bunny Kathryn Leigh Scott's book of the same name. The book and the documentary feature many interviews with former Bunnies on their experiences of working as cottontails in the Playboy Clubs.

A woman who gets paid to break people up is forced to become a matchmaker when some new competition muscles her out of the break-up business. Now, in order to save her company (and keep her high-priced wardrobe) she'll have to rely on her old nemesis: love.

Samar, a child of the war, finds relief from the chaos around her through Egyptian movies she watches on television. Karim, an artist in retreat from life, remains in his apartment in war-torn West Beirut, confident that he is safe in his familiar neighborhood. An unlikely bond is formed between the two as they face the devastating civil war.

Anna, a photojournalist, travels to Bangkok to pursue her investigations for a news story on the traffic in human beings being carried on by the triads. There she herself is kidnapped and subjected to the same abuse endured by the women she has interviewed and photographed.

After falling off a delivery truck, five shaped rubber bands join together to find their way to a toy store and onto the wrists of three happy children.

The year: 1969. Headlines blare war and civil unrest while John Lennon and Yoko Ono are in love. The eccentic rock 'n' roll couple has just gotten married, and more than happy to be together, they want to change the world. Lying in a hotel bed surrounded by journalists, they announce their mission for peace and invite the rest of the world to symbolically climb into bed with them and share their dream. People call them silly, naive, even ridiculous, yet one famous couple's bed-in spread new hope that there really could be an end to war, hate and violence. Here is rare footage from that amazing time, including footage from John and Yoko's wedding, the infamous bedside confrontation between John and conservative cartoonist Al Capp, Lennon debating media expert Marshall McLuhan, and meeting Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Now twenty years after Lennon's murder, Yoko and others involved in the peace mission reflect on the events of that magical, mystical year.

This documentary examines a selection of real life serial killers and compares them to the fictional Hannibal Lecter.

Zoe is abducted by a suburban single mother named Alina, who just so happens to be a deranged yet altruistic serial killer. As Zoe battles for survival, she finds herself asking what in her life is even worth fighting for.

When two strangers mistakenly pick up the wrong piece of luggage at the airport, each must use the intriguing contents within to track down the other's whereabouts in time for Christmas.

Egypt's Great Pyramid may be humanity's greatest achievement: a skyscraper of stone built without computers or complex machinery. This super-sized tomb has fascinated historians and archaeologists for centuries, but exactly how the ancient Egyptians finished the monument and fitted its two and a half million blocks in a quarter of a century has long remained an enigma. Today the secrets of the pyramid are finally being revealed thanks to a series of new findings. At the foot of the monument, archaeologists are uncovering the last surviving relic of the pharaoh Khufu, whose tomb it is: a huge ceremonial boat buried in flat-pack form for more than 4500 years. It's a clue that points to the important role that ships and water could have played in the pyramids' construction. This documentary follows investigations that reveal how strong the link between pyramids and boats is. It's a story of more than how Egypt built a pyramid: it's about how the pyramid helped build the modern world.

A look at the life and work of Canadian comedy icon David Steinberg.

A disturbed author's house party becomes a scene of carnage when three of his homicidal creations appear.

With a unique blend of dramatic action and behind-the-scenes documentary footage, filmmaker John Walker shares the multi-layered story of British explorer Sir John Franklin and his crew of 128 men, who perished in the Arctic ice during an ill-fated attempt to discover the Northwest Passage, and John Rae, the Scottish doctor who in 1851, discovered their dismal fate. Rae's dark report, which described the crew’s madness and cannibalism, did not sit well with Sir John's widow, Lady Franklin, nor with many others in British society, including Charles Dickens. They waged a bitter public campaign to discredit Rae's version of events and mark an entire nation of northern Inuit with the label of murderous cannibals. A stunning face-to-face meeting between the great-great grandson of Charles Dickens and Tagak Curley, an honoured Inuit statesman who challenges the fraudulent history, vaults the story from the past into the present and we are witness to history in the making.

A weekend at a cottage takes a turn for the worst for a group of aspiring actors when one of them finds out they've booked a blockbuster role, and the rest of the group's jealously takes hold where there's no one else around.

Regína is 10 years old. Her mother, Margrét, works at a home for the elderly and her father is dead. The story begins one sunny summer morning when kids are leaving for the summer camp and Regína has been told she cannot go. While alone at home killing time she discovers her gift, which is hypnotizing singing. Her friend Pétur shows his talent for finding words that rhyme and together they increase the power of singing.

A story of courage, self-discovery, and the bond between mother and daughter proving that when it comes to family, love is love and fear is forgettable.

After losing her husband and two daughters in a robbery, Mallory must face up to her bereavement and ensuing depression.

After the death of his mother, a man tries to discover a meaning to his life, to the universe and to rebuild a relationship with the only family he has left: his gay brother.

A mysterious ship has sailed into Pippi's hometown and the Captain turns out to be her father...

Recent widower Angelo is forced to confront a deeply hidden personal truth when he meets and strikes up an unlikely friendship with openly gay dancer Edmond.

Sergeant Ken Strange, of the Canadian Mounted Police, and his dog, King, are on the trial of the murderer.

Brazilian mobsters kidnap daughter of billionaire and demand her boyfriend lose a high stakes poker match for her safe return.

There is the perfect world of conformity and restrictive social norms, and then there is the underground revolution that is about to take place. Ashi has to make a choice. Does she follow her soul mate, who wants to stay safe in their hidden underground life, or follow her best friend to make the changes that will rock the world above. But there is a third choice for Ashi a choice that will take her life into her own hands and risk losing everything. The Change, a film that explores the power of individuality.

Pierre is in love with two women and has a stable relationship with both of them. His wife, all by herself, makes him feel whole. However, he has the identical feeling with his librarian mistress and cannot understand why this arrangement shouldn't be satisfactory for everyone concerned.

After 5 years, 16-year-old Gaby Roberge, returned to Sainte-Victoire High School with a rebellious air and a dirty attitude. Gaby can't stop thinking about graduating and moving on to CÉGEP where she will meet more intelligent young people. Peggy Lamothe, the school principal, decided to take Gaby under her wing so she could take advantage of her last year in college. She forces Gaby to integrate with the young people in her life and be less aggressive and more social.

Walker takes us on a personal journey into a world of myth and imagination that he learned from his grandmother. He travels from the Moors of Devon and the Highlands of Scotland to the brooding Celtic landscapes of Ireland and the intimate hills of Cape Breton, in his search of this potent “otherworld” of the imagination.

Drama about a former police officer who's framed for murder and a young boy who attempts to help him clear his name.

July 1969. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are 240,000 miles from earth facing the most hazardous venture in the history of space flight; the first human landing on another world. They'll succeed, abort, or die in the attempt.

After hearing that a famous actress is dying in a hospital after being hit by a car, a reporter goes to the hospital to interview the actress. She then tells the reporter that her wealthy fiance, who was killed in an accident several years before, was actually murdered. Before long the reporter finds herself in a web of corruption, mental illness and murder.

When Maria thinks she's at the bottom of the barrel, she discovers that this barrel has a double bottom: no job, no money, no worthy accomplishment and now a dying mother begging her to do something with her life. before his death! She has no other choice but to get back in hand and find a career ... But what can she do with a 7-year-old BAC in communication and no work experience? Believe it or not, she can become a substitute in a high school! Thus, Maria, 30, as responsible and stable as a 14-year-old teenager, returns to high school in the role of the one to whom she threw pieces of erasers: the replacement. Too jaded teachers, rebellious teenagers, intimidated or not sufficiently denounced, she will be confronted with the reality of teachers and young people today and, who knows, may discover a vocation.

When Canada entered World War II, the National Film Board suddenly had an urgent new mission—and hundreds of women stepped forward, helping to create Canadian cinema as we now know it.