Canada

  • Alanis Obomsawin – Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993)

    Alanis Obomsawin1991-2000CanadaDocumentaryPolitics
    Kanehsatake 270 Years of Resistance (1993)
    Kanehsatake 270 Years of Resistance (1993)

    Quote:
    In July 1990, a dispute over a proposed golf course to be built on Kanien’kéhaka (Mohawk) lands in Oka, Quebec set the stage for a historic confrontation that would grab international headlines and sear itself into the Canadian consciousness. Pathbreaking filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin – at times with a small crew, at times alone – spent 78 days behind Kanien’kéhaka lines filming the armed standoff between protesters, the Quebec police, and the Canadian army. The result is a uniquely harrowing, unsettling, and impactful cinematic experience.Read More »

  • John N. Smith – First Winter (1981)

    1981-1990CanadaDramaJohn N. SmithShort Film
    First Winter (1981)
    First Winter (1981)

    This historical drama features the first winter spent in Canada by a family of Irish immigrants deep in the Ottawa Valley. The year is 1830.

    In their first Canadian winter an Irish immigrant family is finding life a struggle at the best of times. Now, with the father away for work during the winter, the mother and the children labor for a bare existence. Then tragedy strikes and the young survivors must call upon their inner strengths to make it through the unforgiving season.Read More »

  • Bachir Bensaddek – Montréal la blanche AKA Montreal, White City (2015)

    2011-2020Bachir BensaddekCanadaDrama
    Montréal la blanche (2015)
    Montréal la blanche (2015)

    Quote:
    In Montreal, one evening when Christmas has fallen during Ramadan, the Muslim fast, the paths of two Algerians cross momentarily, resurrecting a past they thought was long buried. Amokrane, a taxi driver, has fled his home and the festivities on the grounds that it will be a profitable night to work. He picks up Kahina, a young, slightly disoriented professional who is attempting to contact her ex-husband to collect her daughter and head for an obscure destination up north. Amokrane recognizes Kahina as his idol, a former pop star in Algeria, who he thought was dead.Read More »

  • Daniel Roher – Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band (2019)

    2011-2020CanadaDaniel RoherDocumentary
    Once Were Brothers Robbie Robertson and The Band (2019)
    Once Were Brothers Robbie Robertson and The Band (2019)

    Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band is a confessional, cautionary, and occasionally humorous tale of Robbie Robertson’s young life and the creation of one of the most enduring groups in the history of popular music, The Band. The film is a moving story of Robertson’s personal journey, overcoming adversity and finding camaraderie alongside the four other men who would become his brothers in music and who together made their mark on music history. Once Were Brothers blends rare archival footage, photography, iconic songs and interviews with many of Robertson’s friends and collaborators including Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Martin Scorsese, Peter Gabriel, Taj Mahal, Dominique Robertson, Ronnie Hawkins, and more.Read More »

  • Gilles Carle – Les Plouffe (1981)

    1981-1990CanadaDramaGilles Carle
    Les Plouffe (1981)
    Les Plouffe (1981)

    Quote:
    The lives of the average Quebecois Plouffe family during the final years of the depression and through World War II.Read More »

  • Matteo Saradini – A Brush of Red (2009)

    2001-2010CanadaHorrorMatteo SaradiniShort Film
    A Brush of Red (2009)
    A Brush of Red (2009)

    A family is trapped in a hotel room while evil animals are outside destroying the city.Read More »

  • Keith Lock – Everything Everywhere Again Alive (1975)

    1971-1980CanadaDocumentaryExperimentalKeith Lock
    Everything Everywhere Again Alive (1975)
    Everything Everywhere Again Alive (1975)

    Synopsis:
    Everything Everywhere Again Alive is a landmark work of Canadian underground cinema, a film diary with mystic and symbolic overtones. In the early 1970s, Toronto filmmaker Keith Lock moved to Buck Lake, where members of the Toronto art scene were undertaking an experiment in communal living. Lock filmed the achievements and daily rituals of his fellow communards, his camera bearing witness as a community assembled and dispersed. The resulting film uses poetic strategies, including logograms and other graphic disruptions, to extend its themes of renewal and rebirth, and to mark the encounter between reason and imagination, the concrete and the abstract.Read More »

  • Ryan Ermacora & Jessica Johnson – Labour/Leisure (2019)

    Jessica Johnson2021-2030CanadaDocumentaryRyan Ermacora

    Synopsis
    The Okanagan Valley is marketed as a destination of leisure, recreation and wealth. Behind this facade is a largely invisible labour force, comprised of temporary migrant workers from the Global South.Read More »

  • Lynne Stopkewich – Kissed (1996)

    Drama1991-2000CanadaLynne StopkewichThe Female Gaze

    Quote:
    Sandra Larson has always been fascinated by the entire sensory experience surrounding death: its touch, smell and look. As a child, she would search out dead animals and perform ritualistic burials. As a young woman, Sandra gets a job at Wallis Funeral Home, first as a general assistant, then progressing to study to become an embalmer. At the funeral home, she begins to take her fascination with death to the next level by becoming a necrophiliac. But she also begins her first ever relationship with Matt, a medical student, with who she is totally open about her necrophilia. He finds this aspect of her compelling. He becomes all consumed with her as she is consumed with dead people. The questions become how far he will take this fascination with her to understand fully what is going through her emotional being, how far she will allow him to go, and how far can her feelings for him extend as a live being.Read More »

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