Film Categories: Families

  • The Sweater

    Historian Carolyn Steedman, in writing about her own working-class childhood, describes how, for children of working-class families, it is often the mother and not the father who embodies power. The child experiences a father who is relatively powerless in the larger social world outside the home, so that even if he is physically powerful, as my father was, he can simultaneously be perceived as a weak man. “The Sweater” blends 16mm hand processed film with found footage and video to explore childhood memories triggered by finding the last thing my deceased father gave me. Using short vignettes, I tell several…

  • A Life on the Borderlands

    This is a film about my father, who immigrated to Montreal from Chile in the early 1970s after a hard-scrabble life on the streets of Santiago as a youth. Like my mother, who immigrated from Argentina around that time, his mobile life was characterised by neither chain migration nor lasting social ties with members of his ethnic group. His story is also a story about class, politics, and complicated histories of migration and exile.

  • A Parent’s Wishlist

    A short film about upward mobility and working class aspirations, A Parent’s Wishlist focuses on something that could be found in many North American homes between the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – a set of encyclopedias. Dragged from one city to another and across the country by my Chilean father, his Encyclopedia Britannica set came to symbolise his hope for a better life for both himself, and for me.

  • The Places We Lived

    The Places We Lived uses a large family archive of Super8 and digital home movies from the mid-1970s to late 1990s to grapple with the hopes, dreams, and disappointments of two South American immigrants who moved to Montreal in the wake of the excitement and optimism generated by Expo ’67. This story focuses on the father, Jose (“Pepe”), whose life in Canada followed four hardscrabble decades in Chile. A story about childhood and fatherhood, aging, capitalism, and obsolescence, The Places We Lived opens up new questions about class, memory, diasporic narratives, and the complicated histories of migration and exile.

  • K-SARAM I: Tale of the pig head

    Centered around the Koryo-saram community in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, the film displays a shamanistic memorial ancestral ritual „Jesa”, encompassing the collective memory of Korean diaspora, the wish of the Koryo-saram for a unification of South and North Korea, and showing the real appearance of the ghosts of migrants whose transformation to spirits was not succeeded. “Saram” means human in Korean. The title refers to the today very popular K-export- products like K-Drama, K-Pop, K-Beauty, etc. and to the name that the Soviet-Korean diaspora uses instead of the South-Korean term “Koryo-In”. Approximately 500,000 ethnic Koreans reside in the former Soviet Union. Most…

  • Pappy’s Garden

    A personal tribute to the filmmaker’s grandfather, a first-generation immigrant to Toronto, Canada from Jamaica in the 1950s. Through both digital and super 8mm found family footage, Mike’s past catches up with him as he struggles with difficult memories from his childhood in Jamaica, finding comfort in his spectacularly over-grown garden.

  • Pur Laine

    PUR LAINE is a story about Ruby, a filipina, married to Roy, a Quebecois man, who dies and leaves her penniless. Ruby struggles with Roy’s drug addict daughter, Marie Claire, over who gets to sell Roy’s house, which also happens to be Marie Claire’s childhood home. A dramedy of errors, their collision reveals what they really want on the inside.

  • Mother’s Bond

    When Aisha’s husband is convicted of being a “leading” member of a vicious street gang, she and her six children must confront a world of judgment in order to survive

  • Beyond Curls & Kinks

    Beyond Curls & Kinks follows a group of women who are challenging beauty standards and empowering each other and the next generation to embrace their coily kinky curly hair. The film explores the complex relationship they have with their Afro-textured hair and issues such as self-esteem, confidence and identity. It also challenges society to see women and girls beyond their curls & kinks.

  • Ghost Story

    Within a single Chinatown room, we see fragments of the lives of the Chinese immigrants who lived there over a span of sixty years – a bachelor in the 1890s, a small family group in the 1920s, a young post-war couple with children in the 1940s, and a grandfather with his two Americanized grandsons in the 1950s. The characters are ghosts, transparent as they fade in and out, mixing their lives and family stories. As these ghosts occupy the same room for one last time, their dialogues are interwoven and always return to the subject of ghosts, a strong part…