June Night

“Ideas and inventions are a strange thing.” William H. Loewen’s dynamic support of the arts has translated into a blossoming of imaginative work in Manitoba and across the country. Bolstered by an all-Manitoba creative team, director Mike Maryniuk sets documentary against experimental animation and a unique musical score to explore what it means to nurture creativity and see it grow.

This short documentary profiles an imaginative inventor and craftsman who makes whimsical stringed instruments out of unlikely items. In his hands, shovels, rakes, baseball bats, and stop signs become beautiful and functional guitars, violins, banjos, and fiddles.

After a near-death experience, retired machinist Lorne Collie embarked on his creative journey, and this heartening film offers a folksy, one-of-a-kind portrait of Collie's spirit and talent. Through weathered doc footage and hand-crafted animation, the film shows that Collie is having more fun than he’s had in a long time and feeling more than alive.

Pia Yona Massie's Sayonara Super 8 uses personal archival footage to ask questions about the fragile nature of memory, human relationships and the foibles of the medium itself.

In this feature-length documentary, 8 Inuit teens with cameras offer a vibrant and contemporary view of life in Canada's North. They also use their newly acquired film skills to confront a broad range of issues, from the widening communication gap between youth and their elders to the loss of their peers to suicide. In Inuktitut with English subtitles.

Using video recording technology, the citizens of Rosedale, once referred to as "the rear end of Alberta" by a frustrated citizen, pulled themselves together as a community. They formed a citizens' action committee, cleaned up the town, built a park, and negotiated with the government to install gas, water and sewage systems. And all this happened within five months.

In this short documentary, teenagers discuss experimental Arthur Lipsett films they have just watched. What do these films mean? What feelings or thoughts do they evoke? What do they suggest about the evolution of mankind and the future of life on Earth? The 2 Arthur Lipsett films being discussed, Free Fall and A Trip Down Memory Lane, are also included.

This film introduces the Fogo Island/Newfoundland Project series which is an experiment in how film can be a catalyst for social change by serving as a direct means of communication. It gives some basic facts about Fogo Island, Newfoundland, and explains why it was chosen for the film project.

In this feature-length documentary, 8 Inuit teens with cameras offer a vibrant and contemporary view of life in Canada’s North. They also use their newly acquired film skills to confront a broad range of issues, from the widening communication gap between youth and their elders to the loss of their peers to suicide.

This documentary demonstrates the transformative power of video through the stories of four at-risk youths. These young people have issues ranging from addiction to a life spent on the street, or in foster homes. In learning to make videos about their lives, they've discovered a creative outlet that allows them to heal.

The group completes their experience by spending a weekend with a group of former street kids who did a similar workshop a decade earlier. Now in their 30s, they share their stories with their younger counterparts. Surprising, and often disturbing, parallels emerge between the two groups, along with glimmers of hope for the youth.

After winning a lifetime achievement award, there’s nowhere left to go but down… into the bowels of the Afterlifetime Achievement Agency, a placement service that helps Laureates find their next gig.

This feature documentary follows up on 2 important NFB documentaries that captured the turbulent year of 1967, a time when social and cultural revolution, as well as generational change, were on everyone’s mind. The first, Christopher’s Movie Matinée, followed the travels of 14 Toronto teenagers over the course of the summer, while the second, Flowers on a One-way Street, documented the conflict between the hippies of the day and Toronto City Council, over the future of the Yorkville neighbourhood, then Canada's counter-culture capital. More than 2 decades later, the filmmakers have sought out some of the films' participants, not as an exercise in nostalgia but to discover what traces remain in the lives of those who most deeply felt the impact of the '60s