Genres: documentary

  • Displaced View, The

    “The Displaced View” traces a personal search for identity and pride, within the unique and suppressed history of the Japanese in Canada. Through an examination of the emotional and cultural links between the women of one family, the processes of the construction of memory and the re-construction of history are revealed. Utilizing an innovative combination of experimental, dramatic and documentary forms, the film emerges as a deeply moving and compassionate love letter. Just as the official history of the Japanese Canadians has been thrown into question, so does the film’s fictionalized narrative question doumentary as truth.

  • Trinidad

    “Trinidad” uncovers Trinidad, Colorado’s transformation from Wild West outpost to “sex-change capital of the world,” and follows three transgender women who may steer the rural ranching town toward becoming the “transsexual mecca.”

  • Chip & Ovi

    Chip and Ovi met in an orphanage near the city of Kluj-Napoca in Romania during their teenage years. Ovi was born with disabilities in his arms and Chip has a severely damaged leg from polio. Both were abandoned shortly after birth to be raised in the care of the state. Despite their difficult situation, they dare to dream big: Chip wants to be an oilman in Texas and Ovi a professional cameraman. With humor and charm, they struggle to overcome their disabilities, social discrimination and poverty while dealing with the inevitable ups-and-downs of their relationship. “Featuring a complex, all-encompassing look…

  • My Own Private Lower Post

    “My Own Private Lower Post” is the story of Duane Gastant’ Aucoin, a two-spirited Tlingit, as he seeks to understand how his mother’s trials at Lower Post Resident School have influenced his life. As she shares her story, he comes to understand how he too is a survivor. Haa Koosteeyi (Our Tlingit Way) is where mother and son find the strength to overcome and truly survive. “My Own Private Lower Post” won an Honourary Mention (runner-up) for best BC Short at the 2009 Vancouver Queer Film Festival. This groundbreaking video has been called “enjoyable, emotional and historic” (Whitehorse Star review).…

  • For the Lucky and the Strong

    “For the Lucky and the Strong” synchronizes appropriated YouTube clips from nine young women to create a united chorus singing Bette Midler’s “The Rose.” Evoking a stalker-like quality by design, “For the Lucky and the Strong” makes the viewer complicit as voyeur, along with the masses who fixate on vulnerable young girls. The women stare into their webcams, some self-consciously, in an act of performative bravery and dramatic teenage angst, but they cannot hold the gaze and look away.

  • Conchitas

    Slippery, colourful gummy bears and hundreds of little conches are used to construct a barrier against the stillness of a summer day. Two landscapes are juxtaposed, one of Georgian Bay in Lake Huron and the other of Veracruz Beach in Panama City. Two voices narrate an intimate conversation about the fear of dangers hidden deep in salty waters. Spanish with English subtitles.

  • House of Olga, The

    The roots of invasive vines threaten the preservation of Casco Antiguo’s declining heritage buildings in the historic district of Panama City. While the area continues to gentrify rapidly, Olga quietly tends to the plants amidst her home of ruins. “THE HOUSE OF OLGA” documents an unorthodox traveler in search of the perfect dwelling. Spanish with English subtitles.

  • Divine Solitude

    A performance film featuring dancer-choreographer Nana Gleason, whose solo works are an incisive and spellbinding alchemy of modern Western dance forms and Far-Eastern traditions. “Nana Gleason makes of her art an almost monastic exercise that follows its own set of gestural imperatives. Most notable is the way she flirts with a nameless physical otherness, sometimes through the use of physical extensions (a single platform boot, an extra long arm). She is a compelling figure, lovingly revealed in Lariviere’s film.” – Robert Everett-Green, The Globe & Mail “Lariviere, supported by the discreet cinematography of Peter Mettler and Kemp Archibald, has kept…

  • Northland: Long Journey

    A film about environment, family and justice. “Northland: Long Journey” is an evocative meditation on filmmaker Edie Steiner’s quest for new truths regarding her father’s death from occupational illness three decades prior. The film revisits an early National Film Board of Canada film, where her mining father is posed as a heroic worker. He later died from exposures to workplace toxins, but his death was officially denied to be related to his work environment. A generation later, new scientific evidence amended the original legal and medical judgments, and the process of making the film became an appeal for justice. Filmed…

  • I’d Rather Be Looking At Porn

    An anthem for the disenchanted. When the respectable and desirable activities of modern society have turned to rot and stupidity, one voice calls out for a retreat to that which is supposed to be so disreputable.