When All the People Play

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.

This short film was an experiment in using video recordings and closed circuit television to stimulate social action in a poor Montreal neighbourhood. A citizen's committee filmed people's concerns and then played back the tapes for the community. Upon recognizing their common problems, people began to talk about joint solutions. It proved an important and effective method of promoting social change.

This short film is a series of vignettes of life in Saint-Henri, a Montreal working-class district, on the first day of school. From dawn to midnight, we take in the neighbourhood’s pulse: a mother fussing over children, a father's enforced idleness, teenage boys clowning, young lovers dallying - the unposed quality of daily life.

This full-length documentary from the Challenge for Change program addresses housing issues affecting Montreal in the mid-1970s. As the city is restoring older apartments through direct action and government subsidies, new, low-rent housing is being integrated into old neighborhoods.

This experimental feature-length drama by Gilles Groulx follows three main characters who embody different attitudes about consumerism. A window onto Quebec in the late 1960s, this protest film explores these characters’ daily lives, their trials and aspirations. Where Are You? is an innovative and militant work, buoyed by hard-hitting film language that includes subtitles and intertitles, quotations, offscreen voices and songs and references to advertising.

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.

When movie cameras were put in the hands of a few young people, they made this film about themselves and their world. The footage they gathered is presented in feature film with very little editing. There are sit-ins, love-ins, animated discussions among themselves about almost everything, and encounters with adults on a bus and on the street. The film is a revealing portrait of a dissenting generation and its rationale.

An impressionistic portrait of the 1970s in sights, songs and music.

In this short film, we witness two Fogo Island festivities: a Roman Catholic wedding in Joe Batts Arm South and a party with music and dancing in Joe Batts Arm North.

This short film from Colin Low presents the problems faced by the people of Fogo Island, Newfoundland and what keeps them committed to the land. Witness some of the magic of the island, as seen through the eyes of children, and understand why its inhabitants cling to its shores.

A collaborative work made in the spirit of cinéma-vérité, St-Henri, the 26th of August was directed by Shannon Walsh and16 fellow documentary filmmakers. Chronicling life in a former working-class Montreal neighbourhood over a 24-hour period, St-Henri, the 26th of August follows several compelling stories and characters. The film is an homage to the 1962 Hubert Aquin classic À Saint-Henri le cinq septembre.