Film Categories: Identity

  • Angela

    This short documentary explores a week in the life of Angela—a roller derby athlete and transgender rights activist in Alberta, Canada. As a jammer for the Calgary All-Stars team, she skates under the name Easy Break Oven and is a role model in the local derby community. She also coaches kids from the small-towns surrounding the city, which is one of the most conservative and religious parts of the country. While preparing for her first derby match of the season, she begins to see her teammates and her life in a new light.

  • David In Brief

    The story of David and Goliath is one of the oldest narratives of all time. The legend continues to resonate with individuals and cultures from around the world and offers a perspective that everyone has the power to overcome impossible situations, even when the odds of failure are high. For years, I hid from my own Goliath: personal struggles with sexual identity and, questioning who I was as an individual. Like so many others, I had to risk relationships and acceptance to be the man I wanted to be. I wanted to hear how others, with larger-than-life obstacles, faced their…

  • Potamkin

    In 1933, at age 33, Harry Alan Potamkin died of complications related to starvation, at a time when he was one of the world’s most respected film critics. In his writings, he advocated for a cinema that would simultaneously embrace the fractures and polyphony of modern life and the equitable social vision of left radical politics. This film-biography is assembled out of distorted fragments of films on which he had written, an impression of erupting consciousness. At the Odessa steps, trampling gives breath to the child. The bullet miraculously reforms the face. The Cossacks march backwards, retreating unseen into their…

  • The Third Movement

    World-renowned transgender classical pianist, Sara Davis Buechner, lost a flourishing New York career after transitioning from male to female. The Third Movement is an intimate portrait that explores Sara’s battle to earn back her spot on the world stage, while also facing trans-targeted stigma and bias. As Sara dreams about a comeback, she helps guide the next generation of piano greats on their rise to the top. Ultimately, the film is a creative and nuanced depiction of an artist with unrelenting determination in the face of discrimination.

  • Four Winds

    Four Winds Wellness Association presents a fictional documentary on Dr. Miles Bennell and Dr. Patricia Lunbed, the founders of Link 8. The video tells the story of how Miles and Patricia meet and form a new technology that influences science and culture called Personality Sharing.

  • Devi (Goddess)

    Tara is a feisty teenager living with her single mother – a proud and elaborate woman, who resists her daughter’s fleeting outbursts of rebellion. Tara risks family and social tradition as she pursues her attraction towards her housemaid, Devi. When they are caught together at a dinner party, Tara must suddenly define who she really is. Set in New Delhi, the film explores the reality of being a closeted lesbian in contemporary India.

  • Ritual

    “Ritual” is a non-linear video piece that explores cosmic mythmaking. As the video loops, a cyclical story of birth, separation, transformation, purification, death, and rebirth is told through provocative imagery and lyrical text.

  • [untitled & unlabeled]

    In this very personal experimental work, director Terry Jones reflects upon the moment he was told he was “different” and how that left an imprint on the narrative of his life.

  • ALTERATIONS

    J’s manic depressive mother, Mary Jane, had a heart attack when J told her that she wanted to live as a woman. Now J is making a movie to sort things out. When Mary Jane awoke from her coma, she woke up believing that she is someone else. J’s brother insists that J patches things up with their amnesiac mother and when the two meet again for the first time as women, an innocent, weekend adventure to face each other’s fears manages to keep their monsters at bay. Protected by their new identities, the two women find a best friend…

  • aw • rah • nyoosh

    A documentary filmmaker attempts to imagine, along with his father, his grandmother’s experience at a labor camp during the holocaust. As they get drawn into a world of the grandmother’s romance, they begin to lose control of their imaginations. “The son installs the camera, the father stands on the sofa. They are preparing to begin an intergenerational dialogue based on the newspaper that their mother and grandmother, Sari, held in the 40s, during his deportation. aw • rah • nyoosh [aranyos] , from Ben Neufeld, takes time to set up; the viewer takes time to understand the contract that the…