Genres: feature

  • Film About a Father Who

    Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, Sachs’ cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately…

  • The Astronauts’ Bodies

    When his two mature children Anton and Linda start leaving the house, after graduating from school, father Michael stops taking care of his body as a protest. His son Anton takes part in a bed-rest-study to contribute to space-traveling, while his sister Linda is in search of her first sexual experience and is drawn to a suspicious young man. The film is a poetic story about the progression of dreams to go to space and about the organic beauty of the human body, its desires and longings.

  • Rettet das Feuer (Rescue The Fire)

    Berlin, 1993. Photographer and artist, Jürgen Baldiga, battles HIV. In the 1990s, the AIDS epidemic reached its climax, to which no one was prepared. Infected bodies and their stories diminish, erasing their existence. Through the death of his friends and subsequently his own, Baldiga becomes the chronicler of his time: “I am taking a picture. I photograph the world. I exist.” Identity and history disappear without the persistence of memory. Until the final days of his life, Jürgen documents the exodus that seizes him. Rettet das Feuer (Rescue the Fire) directs the gaze to a piece of West Berlin history…

  • Through Foreign Eyes

    The filmmaker thought of making this poetic, mosaic documentary in a bookshop, when she came across the words of poet Manoel de Barros about “the accent of the place of our origin we carry in our eyes”. She never found the quote again, but in the course of the next few years, she carried out the project with the help of other contributors, mainly the film editor. She created a film essay combining reflections on the identity and ethnic roots of several natives of the Brazilian city of Recife, who live abroad, and the images of the places where they…

  • God Straightens Legs

    Filmmaker Joële Walinga documents a moment of faith and waiting in the life of her Christian mother, a French-Canadian living in the Bible Belt who has opted to forgo cancer treatment.

  • On A Clear Day You Can See The Revolution From Here

    An expansive journey through the Kazakh steppe, On A Clear Day You Can See the Revolution From Here excavates layers of myth, history and geology to reveal the shifting fault lines between a government, its people and their land. The film brings into focus Kazakhstan’s search for a post-Soviet identity and a state-sponsored programme of cultural production that on the one hand connects back to the ancient folklore and belief systems of the Silk Road, while on the other, seeks to embrace the values of Western capitalism. Taking an experimental documentary form, On A Clear Day provides a meditative faux…

  • WELL ROUNDED

    Soft? Dark? Queer? WELL ROUNDED is here! Featuring Mi’qmaw force of nature, comedian and broadcaster, Candy Palmater. Edgy, hilarious, unapologetically raunchy, and sometimes tear-jerking, WELL ROUNDED brings you your new super queer XXXL racialized BFFs in comedy, fashion, health and research to help combat those pesky systemic fatphobias that threaten to make you hate yourself — when actually you’re PLENTY amazing just as you are. Blending gorgeous interviews with dreamy animation, director Shana Myara assembles personal stories from a diverse, captivating cast whose horrors, triumphs and commitment to dreaming large offer BIG inspiration — especially for those of us who…

  • Kitâb al-Isfâr: Book of the Journey

    An immersive cinematic poem of a seven year journey of return, Kitâb al-Isfâr: Book of the Journey weaves together stories of near-death and mystical experience in Andalucia. When I was 19 I set out, hoping I could learn the meaning of life by “experiencing everything.” I bought a car for 20 marks in a cafe in Ulm. I spray painted it yellow and green and drove it from Holland to Romania to Spain, sleeping in the back seat in a red blanket. Driving down to Malaga, at the crest of the mountains, the brakes went out. As the car sped…

  • Pur Laine

    PUR LAINE is a story about Ruby, a filipina, married to Roy, a Quebecois man, who dies and leaves her penniless. Ruby struggles with Roy’s drug addict daughter, Marie Claire, over who gets to sell Roy’s house, which also happens to be Marie Claire’s childhood home. A dramedy of errors, their collision reveals what they really want on the inside.

  • Contents under Pressure

    An anxious young party-goer finds love at a party, but after committing a party faux pas, is destroyed in a washing machine accident. From here, the project pivots, self-conscious and needing to recast its hero, who quickly has an existential crisis (“what’s my motivation?”). A poetic, quirky, singular meditation on identity and personal history, populated with the beautiful vistas of Atlantic Canada.