Genres: documentary

  • The Translation is Approximate

    This video focuses a conversation that Naqvi witnessed between her aunt and a domestic worker over financial matters. For many reasons — the ambivalence of the situation, the respective socioeconomic positions of the two women involved in the scene, and the very nature of the recording, which careened between documentary and voyeurism — these images have long haunted Naqvi. In the Translation is Approximate (2021), Naqvi retrieves the original footage that she shot in 2013 and traces back her thoughts about what motivated her to revisit this material. This short video both provides insight into her approach and fundamentally questions…

  • Grey Gardens

    Meet Big and Little Edie Beale – high society dropouts, mother and daughter, reclusive cousins of Jackie O. – thriving together amid the decay and disorder of their ramshackle East Hampton mansion. Five years after “Gimme Shelter,” the Maysles unveiled this impossibly intimate portrait of the unexpected, an eerie echo of the Kennedy Camelot, which has since become a cult classic and established Little Edie as fashion icon and philosopher queen.

  • Seaview

    Seaview (2015) is an experimental film which combines home video and captured footage from Karachi, Pakistan. Naqvi travels back to her family’s country of origin to compare childhood memories of this place with lived experience. In the first sequence, she shows video footage of her first trip to Clifton Beach in Karachi. The accompanying text describes her visit to the same beach seventeen years later, and the difficulties in trying to document this place, both as an image maker and as a woman. Naqvi confronts her own personal struggle of being caught between the ideals of Western and Eastern societies.…

  • Delight at Robert St

    Buddy, an old stray cat from Toronto, had managed to conquer a small territory of his own in the center of the city. The filmmaker met Buddy’s gaze every time she went out, she befriended her neighbor and captured his last fall with her old 35mm hand cranked movie camera.

  • A MAGICAL SUBSTANCE FLOWS INTO ME

    A magical substance flows into me opens with a crackly voice recording. The voice is that of Dr. Robert Lachmann, an enigmatic Jewish-German ethnomusicologist who emigrated to 1930s Palestine. While attempting to establish an archive and department of Oriental Music at the Hebrew University, Lachmann created a radio program for the Palestine Broadcasting Service called “Oriental Music”, where he would invite members of local communities to perform their vernacular music. Over the course of the film, Jumana Manna—herself a Palestinian from Jerusalem—follows in Lachmann’s footsteps and visits Kurdish, Moroccan and Yemenite Jews, Samaritans, members of urban and rural Palestinian communities,…

  • PANDALAND: Making IT Count

    “PANDALAND: Making IT Count” is about how children become engaged and learn to grapple with big social issues. The filmmaker accomplishes this by encouraging playful exploration in a multi-media installation of 70+ toy pandas she created in her neighbourhood. The vibe of the film is lighthearted and optimistic. As the children initiate an election on behalf of the pandas, their experience embodies community building, demonstrates acts of civic engagement and conveys the important message that, by working together, even young children can effect change. The film is a life-affirming tribute to kids’ compassion and the birth of their activism! This…

  • Modulations

    A short film about memory, dislocation and cultural identity.

  • HERBARIA × PELICULA: Field Portfolio

    This “Field Portfolio” is a single channel version of the multichannel installation “Herbaria × pelicula.” A consideration of collection as both archive and act, “Herbaria × pelicula” examines the work that takes place at the HAM Herbarium of Royal Botanical Gardens (Canada), located in Burlington ON along the edges of Cootes Paradise wetland, traditional territory of the Mississauga and Haudenosaunee peoples. The herbarium collection, which houses over 60,000 holdings, comprises specimens from around the world but is made up primarily of local vascular plant types gathered by the scientific community and educated hobbyists. Combining documentary footage of the herbarium space,…

  • Light and Land

    Lingering somewhere between fantasy and realism, this futuristic documentary underscores atmospheric phenomenon within mysterious environmental incongruence.

  • Lines Drawn

    Shot in two downtown Toronto parks over the course of the pandemic, Lines Drawn looks at various measures of persuasion, containment and control that were brought to bear over the course of the City’s attempts to curtail the spread of COVID-19. Throughout the pandemic, space was defined by how the social bond was re-formed and which barriers were designed for mutual and directional protection. What are the shapes of the pandemic and how did they shape our interactions with each other? Supported by Media City Film Festival’s Chrysalis Fellowship