
Documentary about filmmaker Bonnie Ammaaq's memories of life on Baffin Island, where her family moved for eleven years during her childhood from the hamlet of Igloolik to return to the traditional Inuit way of life.
0.0Inuit traditional face tattoos have been forbidden for a century, and almost forgotten. Director Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, together with long-time friend and activist Aaju Peter, is determined to uncover the mystery and meaning behind this beautiful ancient tradition. Together they embark on an adventure through Arctic communities, speaking with elders and recording the stories of a once popularized female artform. Central to the film is Arnaquq-Baril’s personal debate over whether or not to get tattood herself. With candour and humour, she welcomes us into her world, to experience firsthand the complex emotions that accompany her struggle. Past meets present in this intimate account of one woman’s journey towards self-empowerment and cultural understanding.
0.0CREE CODE TALKER reveals the role of Canadian Cree code talker Charles 'Checker' Tomkins during the Second World War. Digging deep into the US archives it depicts the true story of Charles' involvement with the US Air Force and the development of the code talkers communication system, which was used to transmit crucial military communications, using the Cree language as a vital secret weapon in combat.
0.0A 13-year-old Indian boy is found unconscious after being attacked in the jungle by the evil spirit Fayu Ujmu. A shaman attempts to ritually tame the spirit and advises the boy’s father to capture it. This story is based on a Chachi Indian legend; it was shot with indigenous inhabitants of the jungle community of Loma Linda, on the Rio Cayapas.
0.0A basketball team born out of an egg, in a hockey-crazed city, playing in a baseball stadium, fights for survival and ultimately conquers a nation and the league. This documentary offers an in-depth look at how a fledgling franchise transformed into a cultural phenomenon, uniting communities and reshaping Canada's identity.
5.5Documenting the shared trajectory between Canada’s rise as a global basketball powerhouse and the circumstances that helped shape the country’s multicultural identity.
6.0Weaving animation and live action, Northlore delves into the transformational stories of people living in Canada’s North and their deep connection to the land and its wildlife.
The injustice of the Japanese internment is explored through the story of Kyuichi Nomoto, one of the first Japanese Canadians to graduate from UBC, who suffered a breakdown deep in the BC Interior.
0.0Two thousand Canadians suffered the longest incarceration anywhere in the Second World War, a bitter four-year period inside Japanese POW camps in Hong Kong and Japan.
1.0This feature documentary examines its own genre, which has often been called Canada's national art form. Released in the year of the NFB's 75th birthday, Shameless Propaganda is filmmaker Robert Lower's take on the boldest and most compelling propaganda effort in our history (1939-1945), in which founding NFB Commissioner John Grierson saw the documentary as a "hammer to shape society". All 500 of the films produced by the NFB until 1945 are distilled here for the essence of their message to Canadians. Using only these films and still photos from that era, Lower recreates the picture of Canada they gave us and looks in it for the Canada we know today. What he finds is by turns enlightening, entertaining, and unexpectedly disturbing.
7.0This documentary let us to relive the challenge of the men behind the 1967 Universal Exposition in Montréal, Canada. By searching trough 80,000 archival documents at the national Archives, they managed to bring light on one of the biggest logistical and political challenges that were faced by organizers during the "Révolution Tranquille" in the Québec sixties. Includes the accounts of the Chief of Advertising Yves Jasmin, and businessman Philippe de Gaspé Beaubien.
7.5This is not a film about gun control. It is a film about the fearful heart and soul of the United States, and the 280 million Americans lucky enough to have the right to a constitutionally protected Uzi. From a look at the Columbine High School security camera tapes to the home of Oscar-winning NRA President Charlton Heston, from a young man who makes homemade napalm with The Anarchist's Cookbook to the murder of a six-year-old girl by another six-year-old. Bowling for Columbine is a journey through the US, through our past, hoping to discover why our pursuit of happiness is so riddled with violence.
One day in the lives of an average Greenlandic family, which happens to be of great importance for 8-year old Kali - he's about to catch his first prey with the harpoon. The whole family is looking forward for the huge step in boy's maturation.
A Circle-Vision 360 degree film capturing the sites, sounds, and people of Canada.
0.0Canadian director Catherine Annau's debut work is a documentary about the legacy of Pierre Trudeau, the long-running Prime Minister of Canada, who governed during the 1970s. The film focuses particularly on Trudeau's goal of creating a thoroughly bilingual nation. Annau interviews eight people in their mid-30s on both sides of the linguistic divide. One tells of her life growing up in a community of hard-core Quebec separatists, while another, a yuppie from Toronto, recalls believing as a child that people in Montreal got drunk and had sex all day long. Annau has all of the interviewees discuss how Trudeau's policies affected their lives and their perceptions of the other side, in this issue that strikes to the heart of Canada's national identity.
6.2Explorer Bruce Parry visits nomadic tribes in Borneo and the Amazon in hope to better understand humanity's changing relationship with the world around us.
5.5Yndio do Brasil is a collage of hundreds of Brazilian films and films from other countries - features, newsreels and documentaries - that show how the film industry has seen and heard Brazilian indigenous peoples since they were filmed in 1912 for the first time: idealised and prejudiced, religious and militaristic, cruel and magic.
0.0The people of Unamenshipu (La Romaine), an Innu community in the Côte-Nord region of Quebec, are seen but not heard in this richly detailed documentary about the rituals surrounding an Innu caribou hunt. Released in 1960, it’s one of 13 titles in Au Pays de Neufve-France, a series of poetic documentary shorts about life along the St. Lawrence River. Off-camera narration, written by Pierre Perrault, frames the Innu participants through an ethnographic lens. Co-directed by René Bonnière and Perrault, a founding figure of Quebec’s direct cinema movement.
