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Anti-Racism Films (Ages 15-17)

15 films
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Racism remains a harsh reality in today’s society. The courage, vulnerability, and resilience needed to face it is rarely taught or modelled. This playlist gives voice to the varied experiences of those who have lived it, creating a meaningful space for dialogue in the classroom. Pour visionner cette sélection en français, cliquez ici. Films in This Playlist Include For Angela nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up Remember Africville Journey to Justice Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance Unwanted Soldiers Ice Breakers Harry Jerome: The Fastest Man on Earth Sleeping Tigers: The Asahi Baseball Story Western Eyes Zero Tolerance Ninth Floor The Colour …

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Anti-Racism Films (Ages 15-17)

Racism remains a harsh reality in today’s society. The courage, vulnerability, and resilience needed to face it is rarely taught or modelled. This playlist gives voice to the varied experiences of those who have lived it, creating a meaningful space for dialogue in the classroom.

Pour visionner cette sélection en français, cliquez ici.

Films in This Playlist Include
For Angela
nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up
Remember Africville
Journey to Justice
Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance
Unwanted Soldiers
Ice Breakers
Harry Jerome: The Fastest Man on Earth
Sleeping Tigers: The Asahi Baseball Story
Western Eyes
Zero Tolerance
Ninth Floor
The Colour of Beauty
Vistas: Boxed In
Mighty Jerome

Playlist

  • For Angela
    For Angela
    Nancy Trites Botkin  &  Daniel Prouty 1993 21 min

    Ages 10-16.
    This short film portrays the experiences of Rhonda Gordon and her daughter, Angela, when a simple bus ride changes their lives in an unforeseeable way. When they are harassed by three boys, Rhonda finds the courage to take a unique and powerful stance against ignorance and prejudice. What ensues is a dramatic story of racism and empowerment.

  • nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up
    nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up
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    Tasha Hubbard 2019 1 h 38 min

    Sensitively directed by Tasha Hubbard, nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up follows the family of the late Colten Boushie, a young Cree man fatally shot in a Saskatchewan farmyard, as they demand justice from Canada’s legal system.

  • Remember Africville
    Remember Africville
    Shelagh Mackenzie 1991 35 min

    Ages 13+.
    This short film depicts Africville, a small black settlement that lay within the city limits of Halifax, Nova Scotia. In the 1960s, the families there were uprooted and their homes demolished in the name of urban renewal and integration. More than 20 years later, the site of the community of Africville is a stark, under-utilized park. Former residents, their descendants and some of the decision-makers speak out and, with the help of archival photographs and films, tell the story of that painful relocation.

  • In the Shadow of Gold Mountain
    In the Shadow of Gold Mountain
    Karen Cho 2004 43 min

    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.

  • Journey to Justice
    Journey to Justice
    Roger McTair 2000 47 min

    Ages 12+.
    This documentary pays tribute to a group of Canadians who took racism to court. They are Canada's unsung heroes in the fight for Black civil rights. Focusing on the 1930s to the 1950s, this film documents the struggle of 6 people who refused to accept inequality. Featured here, among others, are Viola Desmond, a woman who insisted on keeping her seat at the Roseland movie theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia in 1946 rather than moving to the section normally reserved for the city's Black population, and Fred Christie, who took his case to the Supreme Court after being denied service at a Montreal tavern in 1936. These brave pioneers helped secure justice for all Canadians. Their stories deserve to be told.

  • Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance
    Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance
    Alanis Obomsawin 1993 1 h 59 min

    Ages 14+.
    In July 1990, a dispute over a proposed golf course to be built on Kanien’kéhaka (Mohawk) lands in Oka, Quebec, set the stage for a historic confrontation that would grab international headlines and sear itself into the Canadian consciousness. Director Alanis Obomsawin—at times with a small crew, at times alone—spent 78 days behind Kanien’kéhaka lines filming the armed standoff between protestors, the Quebec police and the Canadian army. Released in 1993, this landmark documentary has been seen around the world, winning over a dozen international awards and making history at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it became the first documentary ever to win the Best Canadian Feature award. Jesse Wente, Director of Canada’s Indigenous Screen Office, has called it a “watershed film in the history of First Peoples cinema.”

  • Unwanted Soldiers
    Unwanted Soldiers
    Jari Osborne 1999 48 min

    Ages 13+.
    This documentary tells the personal story of filmmaker Jari Osborne's father, a Chinese-Canadian veteran. She describes her father's involvement in World War II and uncovers a legacy of discrimination and racism against British Columbia's Chinese-Canadian community. Sworn to secrecy for decades, Osborne's father and his war buddies now vividly recall their top-secret missions behind enemy lines in Southeast Asia. Theirs is a tale of young men proudly fighting for a country that had mistreated them. This film does more than reveal an important period in Canadian history. It pays moving tribute to a father's quiet heroism.

  • Ice Breakers
    Ice Breakers
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    Sandamini Rankaduwa 2019 15 min

    Ages 12+.
    Josh Crooks is a promising teen hockey star in a sport where Black players like him are chronically underrepresented. Ice Breakers reveals the buried history of a pioneering Black hockey league in Atlantic Canada, as Crooks discovers that his unshakable passion is tied to a rich and remarkable heritage.

  • Harry Jerome : The Fastest Man on Earth
    Harry Jerome : The Fastest Man on Earth
    Ileana Pietrobruno 2011 10 min

    Ages 10-15.
    This short film is a condensed version of our feature documentary Mighty Jerome, made especially for elementary and middle-school classes. Canadian athlete Harry Jerome overcame racism to reach the height of track-and-field success. When an injury ended his career, Jerome continued training and went on to achieve one of the greatest comebacks in sports history.

  • Sleeping Tigers: The Asahi Baseball Story
    Sleeping Tigers: The Asahi Baseball Story
    Jari Osborne 2002 50 min

    Ages 13+.
    This feature-length documentary tells the story of the Asahi baseball team. In pre-World War II Vancouver, the team was unbeatable, winning the Pacific Northwest Championship for five straight years. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, all persons of Japanese descent in Canada were sent to internment camps. The former Asahi members survived by playing ball. Their passion was contagious and soon other players joined in, among them RCMP officials and local townspeople. As a result, the games helped break down racial and cultural barriers. This remarkable story is told with a combination of archival footage, interviews and dramatic re-enactments.

  • Zero Tolerance
    Zero Tolerance
    Michka Saäl 2004 1 h 15 min

    Ages 13+.
    Being young is tough, especially if you're Black, Latino, Arab or Asian. In a city like Montreal, you can get targeted and treated as a criminal for no good reason. Zero Tolerance reveals how deep seated prejudice can be. On one side are the city's young people, and on the other, its police force. Two worlds, two visions. Yet one of these groups is a minority, while the other wields real power. One has no voice, while the other makes life-and-death decisions.

  • Ninth Floor
    Ninth Floor
    Mina Shum 2015 1 h 21 min

    Ages 15+.
    Director Mina Shum makes her foray into feature documentary by reopening the file on a watershed moment in Canadian race relations – the infamous Sir George Williams Riot. Over four decades after a group of Caribbean students accused their professor of racism, triggering an explosive student uprising, Shum locates the protagonists and listens as they set the record straight, trying to make peace with the past.

  • The Colour of Beauty
    The Colour of Beauty
    Elizabeth St. Philip 2010 16 min

    Ages 11+.
    Renee Thompson is trying to make it as a top fashion model in New York. She's got the looks, the walk and the drive. But she’s a black model in a world where white women represent the standard of beauty. Agencies rarely hire black models. And when they do, they want them to look “like white girls dipped in chocolate.”

  • Boxed In
    Boxed In
    Shane Belcourt 2009 4 min

    Ages 14-16.
    In this short film, a young woman of mixed ancestry struggles with an Equal Opportunity Form that requires her to respond to the dilemma: Ethnicity - Choose One.

  • Mighty Jerome (Short Version)
    Mighty Jerome (Short Version)
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    Charles Officer 2010 52 min

    CAMPUS. In 1959, at just 19, Harry Jerome was Canada's most promising track and field star on his way to the Olympics in Rome. By 1962, after suffering a gruesome leg injury, there was every reason to think that his racing days were over. But Jerome was not just a champion on the track; he was doubly determined off it. And so began his climb to what his coach, Bill Bowerman, called "the greatest comeback in track and field history."

    Through years of unparalleled political turbulence, racial conflict and his own personal challenges, Harry Jerome kept his head down and ran, displaying strength of character and willful perseverance every bit as impressive as his record-setting athleticism.