Film Categories: Race + Ethnicity

  • October Stranger

    “October Stranger” is a highly acclaimed drama about a young Ojibway Indian who must leave his youth behind on the reserve in Northern Ontario in order to pursue his writing career. It is a thoughful and gentle love story, full of fine poetry. Beautifully photographed on location near Sioux Lookout, it reveals modern life on the reserve with a rare depth and respect, as the old ways and the new come to terms with one another. It is the story of an artist finding his voice, and of a native gathering the courage to go “south” to the city.

  • Our Trip

    “Feminist filmmaker and performance artist Barbara Hammer has celebrated her recent trip to Peru with her friend Corky Wick through a diaristic animation of photographs they took during their travels. Landscapes and portraits are given growing patterns of framing and texture with magic markers and tempera paint, expressing the richly evocative folk art of the Incan people they saw as we hear their native music resonate on the soundtrack.” – Anthony Reveaux

  • Panama, The

    “The Panama” chronicles the Chan family of Victoria, B.C. as it evolved from its first days in Canada when the patriarch Chan Dun, at the age of twelve, landed in Victoria in 1890. From this auspicious occasion, a family of eight sons and four daughters would eventually center around the Panama café, a western-style eatery specializing in liver and onions and apple pie to the working class of the city. Located on Government Street by 1930, The Panama café is a story of one of the oldest Chinese Canadian families. It describes its experience during the depression, the war years…

  • Past History

    Adventure, romance, politics and exile are themes in this unique combination of live action, archival photographs, and animation. Stories of people long ago and far away are brought to life, tracing a history of the effects of progress and development in Latin America on past and present generations.

  • Ay Que Pelos!

    “Ay Que Pelos!” is a hand-processed experimental film about anxiety disorders and panic attack syndrome. This bilingual film (interweaving English and Spanish) incorporates personal experiences, family history, case studies and medical texts, and uses these to examine the perception and (mis)understanding of the disease. The film is visually structured to reflect and invoke the experience of panic attack.

  • Perestroyka

    Shot in the spring of 1992 in St. Petersberg and Moscow, “Perestroyka” is a collage of conversations with Russian people, mostly artists, about life in Russia and about their hopes and fears for the future of their country. The position of artists and filmmakers in contemporary Russian society, the position of women in the new Russia, problems of unemployment, the politics of sexuality, and the erosion of traditional values are debated and discussed. Appearing in the tape are (in order of appearance): Sergey Letou Jazz Band, Vladik Mamyshev Monroe (performance artist), Bella Matveeva (painter), Alexandr Sakurov (film director), Liubov Polga…

  • Performance by Jack Smith, A

    In October of 1984, the highly acclaimed New York artist, Jack Smith, came to Toronto for a week long performance/Halloween ritual at the Funnel Experimental Film Theatre. This performance, true to Smithesque form, went by three different titles: “Dance of the Sacred Foundation Application,” “Brassieres of Uranus,” and “Impacted Croissants From Outer Space.” Accompanied by the music of Yma Sumac, this short piece remains the last film documentation of this historic event.

  • Pioneers of X-Ray Technology

    “In Ann Marie Fleming’s ‘Pioneers of X-Ray Technology’ (a film about Grandpa), super-8 home movies are only one part of the film’s cooly complex structure. The first time I saw ‘Pioneers’ it looked like an uncomplicated portrait of Fleming’s grandfather, Dr. Ernest To, who was a photographer, amateur filmmaker and Hong Kong radiologist. On second viewing, the film’s ambivalence towards its subject becomes clear. “Fleming (‘You Take Care Now,’ ‘New Shoes’) is known for the ‘quirkiness’ of her films, but she’s above all a brilliant editor, both cinematographically and conceptually. Like nearly all her films, ‘Pioneers’ benefits from remarkable compression.…

  • Pleasure Film (Ahmed’s Story)

    “In a compelling narrative, a woman relates the trials of a hungry man who will go to great lengths to be fed. This latest work by Ann Marie Fleming once again demonstrates the artist’s delicious sense of the absurd. Featuring Valerie Buhagiar, Howard and His Doghouse and the off-screen presence of Ahmed, a master of tall tales.” – Images Festival of Independent Film & Video, Toronto, 1995

  • FREE JOAN LITTLE

    Free Joan Little tells the story of the 1975 groundbreaking case of Joan Little (pronounced Jo-Ann), who was one of the first women in U.S history to be acquitted for using deadly force to resist sexual assault. Joan was a Black incarcerated woman in North Carolina who killed her white prison guard who was trying to rape her. Little’s murder trial became an international cause célèbre, uniting fractured social movements—Civil Rights activists, feminists, Black Power advocates, and death penalty opponents—in an unprecedented intersectional coalition that challenged systemic racism and sexism in the criminal justice system.