Quo Vadis, Mrs. Lumb?

Julia Kwan’s feature-length documentary Everything Will Be captures a significant moment of time in Vancouver’s Chinatown, with the influx of condos and new, non-Chinese businesses. The film follows a year in the life of several Chinatown denizens, including a 90-year-old Chinese newspaper street vendor and a second-generation tea shop owner, as they navigate this community in flux.

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.

Filmed at the Wing Fong Farm in Ontario, this documentary follows the tilling, planting and harvesting of Asian vegetables destined for Chinese markets and restaurants. On 80 acres of land, Lau King-Fai, her son and a half-dozen migrant Mexican workers care for the plants. For Yeung Kwan, her son, the farm represents personal and financial independence. For his mother, it is an oasis of peace. For the Mexican workers, it provides jobs that help support their children back home.

This documentary gives us a glimpse inside the influential but little-known community of Vancouver’s Hong Kong Chinese. Prejudices fall by the wayside as we discover the community's way of life and the vital role it plays in the Canadian and world economy through a moving, intimate portrait of the Lam family, who arrived here in 1991.

Filmmaker Karen Cho travels from Montreal to Vancouver to uncover stories from the last survivors of the Chinese Head Tax and Exclusion Act, a set of laws imposed to single out the Chinese as unwanted immigrants to Canada from 1885 to 1947. Through a combination of history, poetry and raw emotion, this documentary sheds light on an era that shaped the identity of generations.

This documentary tells the story of a Chinese cemetery in BC that became a National Heritage site. For Chinese pioneers who died in Canada, Victoria's Chinese Cemetery at Harling Point was a temporary resting place until their bones could be returned home. (Traditional Chinese belief says that the soul of a person who dies in a foreign place wanders lost until their bones are returned home.) This film traces the rich history of the Vancouver Island cemetery from controversy and neglect to its revival as a historic site. Told by those closest to it, the story of Harling Point is a metaphor for Canada, a country still working on making a home for all who live within its borders.

Every year thousands of immigrants enter Canada. But what of their homelands and the ties they leave behind? This film visits Holland to tell that human story--the story of the Boelhauers, farm folk who choose emigration as the best means of one day owning their own land. Arriving in Canada, they are given hope by what they see around them. At the same time, Canada has acquired a fine family of the land.

Several years ago, after taking part in the mass uprisings against Bashar al-Assad, Adnan al-Mhamied had to flee Syria with his wife, Basmah, and their four children. Now settled in Montreal, the family opens their door to filmmaker Pascal Sanchez. They’ve adjusted to life in a peaceful city, but Adnan and Basmah still fear for loved ones back in Syria whose status and whereabouts remain unknown. The war that’s thousands of kilometres away continues to haunt them, surging suddenly to the fore in a conversation, Skype call or Facebook feed. Far from Bashar chronicles an endearing family as they go about their lives, tormented by a distant and seemingly interminable conflict.

Paraskeva Clark, artist, socialist, feminist, is her own woman at her own cost. This film is a cameo of an irascible and oftentimes touching artist whose work has won her a place in exhibitions and private collections. Born in Russia in 1898, she eventually married a Canadian and moved to Toronto. Because her canvases reflect a strong social conscience, she had to struggle hard to earn a place in the nation's ultra-conservative galleries.

This documentary follows 2 women whose meeting pieces together both halves of a story: that of slave and slave owner. When Dr. Ruth Whitehead meets graduate student Carmelita Robertson, who had come to do research at the Museum of Natural History in Halifax, the women realize both their ancestors come from South Carolina, and that their names sound shudderingly familiar. Embarking on a journey to Charleston in search of their connection, Ruth and Carmelita encounter a modern South where the Klan is on trial for burning black churches and where they must come to terms with the thunderous cruelty of the past.

Dr. Helen Creighton explores her native Nova Scotia, finding singers and songs in order to document the fast-receding folklore of the early pioneers on her tape recorder.