Perfecting the Art of Longing

After being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, a young mother writes a letter to her daughter about their family’s collective journey to acceptance.

With candor, humour and courage, a group of African-Canadian women challenge cultural taboos surrounding female sexuality and fight to take back ownership of their bodies. Combining her own journey with personal accounts from some of her radiant, endearing friends, co-director Habibata Ouarme explores the phenomenon of female genital mutilation and the road to individual and collective healing, both in Africa and in Canada.

Undertakers are anything but gloomy; they’re funny, generous and dedicated. We would gladly go on vacation with them, but sadly, they never have any dead time.

As the global pandemic reaches into the Arctic Archipelago, Inuk filmmaker Carol Kunnuk documents how unfamiliar new protocols affect her family and community. Her vividly specific soundtrack juxtaposes snippets from local radio broadcasts, issuing health advisories in both Inuktitut and English, with the sweet sounds of children at play. A richly detailed and tender account of disruption and adjustment.

Through an intimate archive of the Chow’s family lineage, A Passage Beyond Fortune offers an homage to the culturally significant but buried history of Chinese-Canadian communities in Moose Jaw.

At her family’s cabin on Wakaw Lake, Saskatchewan, renowned Fransaskois singer-songwriter Alexis Normand invites audiences into a series of candid exchanges about belonging and bilingualism on the Prairies. Weaving together old home movies with current conversations, French Enough illuminates the struggle and triumph of reclaiming francophone Canadian identity. As parents, children and grandchildren sing, play and celebrate, in both French and English, the act of carrying a language forward finally becomes a thing of freedom and joy.

Featuring a unique collection of archival images, home movies and family photographs from Iraq, Baghdad Twist is a short film that pulls back the curtain on Iraq's once thriving Jewish community. Baghdad-born filmmaker Joe Balass takes us on a journey through the fragmented memories of an Arab exile. This powerful collage forms a portrait of a time and place that no longer exists.

A short documentary essay on solitude, filmed in Spanish and narrated by filmmaker Rosana Matecki, Saturday Night offers a poetic and bittersweet snapshot of aging in an urban setting, viewed through the lens of dance. An immersive soundscape and a delicate tempo set the mood for this intimate exploration of resilience and nostalgia.

This short animation is director Ann Marie Fleming’s animated adaptation of Bernice Eisenstein’s acclaimed illustrated memoir. Using the healing power of humour, the film probes the taboos around a very particular second-hand trauma, leading us to a more universal understanding of human experience. The film sensitively explores identity and loss through the audacious proposition that the Holocaust is addictive and defining.

Ghyslain Raza, better known as the “Star Wars Kid,” breaks his silence to reflect on our hunger for content and the right to be forgotten in the digital age.

Even at a frail 90, Martha Katz has an impish energy that remains undiminished. She chides grandson-filmmaker Daniel Schubert over his choice of shirt during a visit to her Los Angeles home, but there’s trauma beneath the humour. At 14, Martha and her family were torn from their village in Czechoslovakia and shipped to Auschwitz. A visit to a Holocaust museum ignites painful memories, including a haunting personal encounter with one of Nazi Germany’s most notorious figures. For Martha, however, the emphasis is on a tough but rewarding postwar life in Winnipeg, which she fondly recalls in this warm, intimate portrait of an unrelenting survivor.