On his way to a rave in the Argentine Pampas, a young queer man gets into an accident. Taking refuge in a mysterious rural tavern where he is conspicuously out of place, his paranoia begins to mount and he worries he might never escape.
This film screens as part of Shorts Program 10: Outré.
In her first film, Canadian artist and animator Matea Radic imagines an impossible return. Paradaïz follows a young woman as she travels back to a city still unstable with the conflict she fled. Blending her own memories of leaving Sarajevo as a child in the early 1990s with a droll sense of humor and a quirky animation style peppered with archival photos, Radic offers an atypical portrait of displacement.
This film screens as part of Shorts Program 2: Animation.
This captivating documentary directed by visionary filmmaker Michèle Stephenson (co-director of Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project), is a provocative confrontation of Canada’s historical and ongoing anti-Black racism. Through a masterful blend of insightful interviews and evocative archival footage, the film traces the height of the nation’s civil rights movement of the ‘60s in the unlikely hotbed of Montreal, revealing how the nation’s myth of tolerance masks a legacy of slavery, systemic exclusion, and generational trauma.
Haunting soundscapes, layered visuals, and non-linear storytelling combine to create a visceral atmosphere that echoes the emotional weight of displacement and erasure. The film not only excavates buried truths about Canada’s complicity in the transatlantic slave trade and xenophobic immigration policies but also challenges viewers to question national narratives that sanitize oppression. With both personal tenderness and historical rigor, True North shatters illusions of Canadian innocence, demanding accountability and reckoning with the untold stories of resistance, survival, and Black resilience on northern soil.
Vancouver Island, the late 1990s: a Hungarian couple and their four children settle into their new home, looking for a fresh start. Through the eyes of the youngest, Sasha, the littler siblings play and crash around their new world, making friends with the neighborhood kids and exploring the wilds of their new backyard. But their oldest brother, the teenage Jeremy, remains aloof and distant, his behavior becoming increasingly troubling. Overhearing concerned whispers between her parents and bearing witness to things she doesn’t quite understand, Sasha begins to sense that something dark is going on with Jeremy.
The evasiveness of memory is at the center of Sophy Romvari’s deeply personal debut: a form-defying experiment delving into family history. A poetic blend of lyrically childlike narrative, inquisitive documentary elements, and mystical reimaginings of real events come together to make sense of a young girl’s complex memories of her older brother’s troubled youth.
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Azra has built a life for herself in Toronto, worlds apart from her conservative Muslim mother. When her father unexpectedly dies on a trip home to Pakistan, Azra finds herself on a Bollywood-inspired journey through memories, both real and imagined, from her mother’s youth in Karachi to her own coming-of-age in rural Canada.
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