Film Categories: Youth

  • Baba Bahram, Look at the Flowers

    Baba Bahram, Look at the Flowers is an experimental short film built from archival footage recorded in Tehran by the artist’s younger brother, Reza, at the age of seven. Holding the camera with playful authority, he roams through their family home, garden, and streets, capturing everyday moments with a sense of wonder and instinct. The footage is addressed directly to their grandfather, Baba Bahram, creating an improvised cinematic letter between generations. The film reflects on intergenerational bonds, memory, and the aesthetics of untrained seeing. Meaning emerges through gesture, movement, and relation. Weaving together personal history with a meditative observational form,…

  • The City And

    On a bleak day in midwinter, a girl travels to her city’s bus station to meet someone. She travels familiar streets and moves confidently. Her relationship with her city changes when no one arrives on the expected bus. She wanders out of the bus station, noticing her city in a new way.

  • The Flower and The Flood

    Following the seasonal cycle of a saffron farm based in the Fraser Valley, the film explores unmechanized labor through harvesting the delicate crocus stamen by hand. After an atmospheric river decimates the flourishing saffron crop in 2021, the flood waters temporarily return Semá:th Xó:tsa to the valley more than a century after its forced draining. The film traces the interconnected history of this sacred lake with the rebuilding of the saffron crop; cultivating community and the most expensive spice in the world. Collaborating with the saffron crocus and other plants through eco-processing and analogue processes, the family garden offers us…

  • Trajectories of Now

    Over an 18-month period, 18 racialized and gender diverse artists took part in creative research to develop artworks and activations responding to the guiding question “What change do you want to make with your art?”. Their work culminated in their group exhibit Trajectories of Now: An Anthology. Through visual, audio, and tactile works, Trajectories of Now documented critical narratives of relationships to identities; both personal and collective. In this short film, eight Trajectories artists discuss their artworks and processes for voicing, surfacing and amplifying creative advocacies and resistances for social change.

  • Never Sleep

    Muna is a timid nonbinary teenager with the ability to communicate with the spirit world through her dreams. Following the sudden death of their father Ibrahim, they chooses to stop sleeping to avoid having to confront his restless spirit. When Muna’s estranged aunt Naja re-enters their life, their collective grief meets the turbulent spirits of their ancestors, and the two family members must decide whether to remain comforted by avoidance or face their fear of emotional vulnerability head on. With Naja’s guidance, Muna manages to forge a path towards rewriting her understanding of memory, loss, legacy and familial responsibility

  • I’ve Got a Little Brother

    A playful look at sibling rivalry orchestrated with the rhythmical beat of the chants kids sing in schoolyards and at home. The fears, latent jealousy, and even cautious approval of little brother are warm and funny. Achieved with simple animation techniques, the film enhances its subject with childlike playfulness.

  • In the Alcove, at the Place

    For “In the Alcove, at the Place” Davis went back to the alcove (a private place in her room) and the place (the four corners of an intersection in Toronto, consisting of a house, two grocery stories, and a coin wash) every couple of weeks for nine months. In her alcove she filmed herself sitting in a chair; at the place she filmed aspects of its everyday life, making discoveries about it and becoming friendly with some of its inhabitants. In both alcove and place, there is change but also repetition. Among other things, the film concerns her growing familiarity…

  • Jimmy Brown the Newsboy

    This visual poem for children utilizes silhouette paper doll cut-outs and characters to follow a young boy and his pet frog on an early morning paper route. The characters dance in time to the music, a traditional American folk tune, from which the film takes its title.

  • Leaving the Poisons Behind

    Animal, fish and bird pictographs struggle to escape the filmic and musical presence of environmental poisons. Primarily an environmental picture, “Leaving the Poisons Behind” can also be seen as a forum for meditation on the idea of leaving behind personal poisons – smoking, drugs, drinking, abusive relationships, and so on. The film may also be of interest to those who are studying aboriginals and their environmental connections, and to those interested in petroglyphs and other figures from neolithic artists. It is a beautiful film as well as an innovative type of music video in film format, making it accessible to…

  • Linear Dreams

    “The sound of a heartbeat pumps life into ‘Linear Dreams’, a scratch animation film that moves from the simple lines of the unconscious to representational realism.” – Toronto International Film Festival, 1997 The word “Linear” is composed of two words: “line,” as in drawing and “ear,” as in hearing. The film was produced by drawing both sound and picture directly onto 35mm motion picture film.