Film Categories: Race + Ethnicity

  • Trans Lives Matter! Justice for Islan Nettles

    A powerful and intensely moving document of a community vigil for Islan Nettles, a transgender Womyn of Colour, concerning her spirit and life. Because the personal is political. Because the brutal and increasing attacks on Trans Womyn of Color are outrageous and their victimization causes outrage. Because healing and action tighten our fists and boom our voices. Islan’s murder was a hate crime, she was only 21. Her vigil was held at Jackie Robinson Park in Harlem, steps away from where she was murdered. This endeavour captured the love and support that the community brought to sustain each other and…

  • Holy Mother My Mother

    A portrait of motherhood filmed during the Navratri celebrations (The Goddess Festival) in India.

  • Performing Girl

    Performing Girl is a short documentary about D’Lo, a queer, transgender, Tamil Sri Lankan American actor, writer, director and comic who got his start at age 11, performing for his family and classmates in the desert town of Lancaster, CA. Animations, home movies, and family snapshots paint the portrait of his personality. In interviews and clips from his performances, D’Lo and his parents explain how his identity and their relationship has changed over the last twenty years.

  • Everything Everywhere Again Alive

    “Everything Everywhere Again Alive” is a nature film with a difference. It is about a concept of nature which is communicated by a series of very simple images. These very simple images are used like building blocks of ideas to build a complex representation of nature as well as diaristic events taking place in the film. “Everything…” is an elaboration of two films by painters Jack Chambers (Circle) and Joyce Wieland (Solidarity) and in another sense, Michael Snow (La Region Centrale). “Everything…” is about space and the meaning of the infinite as it is used in Chinese painting. The shape…

  • A MOOR

    A MOOR – (or a “room” inverted) synthesizes the multiple meanings of securing, uncultivated land, and an ethnic population in its portraits of Caucasian sex tourists who blur into one another through the POV of an unheard and unseen Asian escort. The dynamics of power and race revealed through the clients’ speech and not allowing the Asian character that forms the core of the film to be seen or heard.

  • BLISSED

    The unspoken issue of LGBT domestic violence becomes an allegory for LGBT racial dynamics. Drawing inspiration from the claustrophobic tensions of Tennessee Williams, it distills the undertones between classes in society, the plight of immigrants in Canada, the double-edge of charity, and the transference of violence from people’s fetish and fear.

  • Everything’s for You

    “Everything’s for You” reflects the filmmaker’s relationship with his deceased father, a man who survived both the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz. The film utilizes a combination of previously shot material (1974-78), family photographs, archival footage, printed footage, cell animation sequences (by Emily Hubley), and computer graphics to create a mosaic, a meditation on filial relationships. Dialogue is in both Yiddish and English. “… Ravett makes old snapshots flicker like candles in the wind. Archival footage of the Lodz ghetto appears in ethereal negative. The film is composed of dreamlike fragments and traces, accompanied by Ravett’s incantatory interrogation of these mute…

  • CONTENTUS

    CONTENTUS takes its cue from the meanings of the (latin) word – to strain with exertion, to hold together; in which three parallel stories intersect in a contemporary allegory of labor, loneliness, prejudice, power and place. Connected by isolation, everyday cruelties and unheard stories, the underrepresented characters straddle the metaphoric and the real. An unseen Asian escort’s clientele of Caucasian sex tourists blur into one another, domestic tensions and violence of a professional man and his young live-in immigrant lover, and an encounter between a young banker and his older homeless doppelgänger in a city meridian populated by High Finance…

  • Weaving with Spanish Threads: an Immigrant’s Tale

    In the early 20th century, tens of thousands of Spaniards were driven from their homeland by poverty. Several thousand went to Hawaii to work under contract in the pineapple and sugar cane plantations, and most of these settled permanently in California after their contract were up. Our documentary tells their story, a story reminiscent of that of many other immigrant groups from Europe. We focus on one specific immigrant, Francisco Pérez, 98 years old when we interviewed him. His interview is supplemented by interviews with descendants of other of the immigrants and by on-location footage from Spain, Gibraltar, Hawaii and…

  • Soak

    Soak is a short experimental student film shot and edited on digital formats, produced at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts. This film explores the physical and emotional sensations of self-care. In this film a woman attempts to pull herself out of her sinking mood by taking a bath.