
From challah to immigration to the wandering Jew, Ma Nishma Manitoba is a mid-length documentary that explores Manitoban Jewish stories of identity and history. Filmmakers Johanna and Sara put their own experiences in local context by chatting with several Jewish Manitobans, including a rabbi, politician, artist, Israeli immigrant, and others. Archival materials, illustrations, and stop animations connect history with present-day opinions and stories, as Sara and Johanna explore what being Jewish in Manitoba means to them and others.

From challah to immigration to the wandering Jew, Ma Nishma Manitoba is a mid-length documentary that explores Manitoban Jewish stories of identity and history. Filmmakers Johanna and Sara put their own experiences in local context by chatting with several Jewish Manitobans, including a rabbi, politician, artist, Israeli immigrant, and others. Archival materials, illustrations, and stop animations connect history with present-day opinions and stories, as Sara and Johanna explore what being Jewish in Manitoba means to them and others.
2021-07-12
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6.0Lithuania, 1941, during World War II. Hundreds of thousands of texts on Jewish culture, stolen by the Germans, are gathered in Vilnius to be classified, either to be stored or to be destroyed. A group of Jewish scholars and writers, commissioned by the invaders to carry out the sorting operations, but reluctant to collaborate and determined to save their legacy, hide many books in the ghetto where they are confined. This is the epic story of the Paper Brigade.
0.0This short film is a series of vignettes of life in Saint-Henri, a Montreal working-class district, on the first day of school. From dawn to midnight, we take in the neighbourhood’s pulse: a mother fussing over children, a father's enforced idleness, teenage boys clowning, young lovers dallying - the unposed quality of daily life.
7.1This pioneering documentary film depicts the lives of the indigenous Inuit people of Canada's northern Quebec region. Although the production contains some fictional elements, it vividly shows how its resourceful subjects survive in such a harsh climate, revealing how they construct their igloo homes and find food by hunting and fishing. The film also captures the beautiful, if unforgiving, frozen landscape of the Great White North, far removed from conventional civilization.
A jetliner spans the miles, sheering through clouds to open sky and scenic vistas of the provinces below. Glimpses of town and country, of people of many ethnic origins, of a resourceful and industrious nation - impressions it would take days and weeks to gather at first hand - are brought to you in this vivid 1800-kilometer panorama.
0.0No Jewish divorce is complete without the man literally giving the woman her freedom back. With Israel having neither civil marriage nor divorce, women can get trapped. The film follows several such "chained" women together with Batya, a religious lawyer, who embarks on a struggle against the rabbinical courts.
0.0For First Nations communities, the headdress bears significant meaning. It's a powerful symbol of hard-earned leadership and responsibility. As filmmaker JJ Neepin prepares to wear her grandfather's headdress for a photo shoot she reflects on lessons learned and the thoughtless ways in which the tradition has been misappropriated.
0.0In early 1960s Toronto, a white, Anglo-centric city, an underground music scene emerged from the Jamaican diaspora, led by newcomers like Jackie Mittoo, Wayne McGhie, and a young Jay Douglas. Battling racism and indifference, they left a lasting but underrecognized mark on Canadian music and culture. Nearly 60 years later, Jay Douglas still champions Jamaican music and is finally receiving long-overdue recognition. Play It Loud is a feature documentary that tells the little-known story of how Jamaican music became a vital, unlikely part of Canadian culture. It traces a cultural migration that made Canada a global hub for Jamaican music - celebrated abroad but overlooked at home. Told through the life and music of beloved singer Jay Douglas, born Clive Pinnock in rural Jamaica, the film follows his journey from teen performer to enduring icon.
0.0A documentary chronicling the adolescent years of Elie Wiesel and the history of his sufferings. Eliezer was fifteen when Fascism brutally altered his life forever. Fifty years later, he returns to Sighetu Marmatiei, the town where he was born, to walk the painful road of remembrance - but is it possible to speak of the unspeakable? Or does Auschwitz lie beyond the capacity of any human language - the place where words and stories run out?
0.0OUTREMONT AND THE HASIDIM reveals the challenges of accommodating the “Hasidim” – or ultra-Orthodox Jews – in the affluent Montréal borough of Outremont.Some 7,000 Hasidim live in or near this choice neighbourhood of Québec’s Francophone elite. After settling there more than 70 years ago, the Hasidim are a rapidly growing minority group which today represents about 23% of Outremont’s population.Thanks to unprecedented access to this self-isolated community, the film lifts the veil on its practices, traditions, music and life as they had never before been seen on Canadian television, without ignoring the community’s expectations, fears. and hopes.
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.
7.2A young and ambitious team of chefs face the life-changing challenges of competing in the world's most prestigious culinary competition.
0.0In the mid-1950s, lured by false promises of a better life, Inuit families were displaced by the Canadian government and left to their own devices in the Far North. In this icy desert realm, Martha Flaherty and her family lived through one of Canadian history’s most sombre and little-known episodes.
5.7Legendary documentary filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin provides a glimpse of what action-driven decolonization looks like in Norway House, one of Manitoba's largest First Nation communities.
7.0Every winter for decades, the Northwest Territories, in the Canadian Far North, changes its face. While the landscape is covered with snow and lakes of a thick layer of ice, blocking land transport, ice roads are converted to frozen expanses as far as the eye can see.
0.0A feature length documentary about extraordinary Canadian singer songwriter, Ron Hynes... an insightful and entertaining exploration of the creative process, the genesis of song, the meaning of performance and the vulnerability of an artist compelled to bare his soul through his music. The film is comprised of Ron performing his music (distinct and live for the camera), interwoven with very intimate black box 'interviews' with Ron (shot tightly and directly addressed to the camera), in which he discusses the songs and the life that informed them: late nights, dark alleys, marriage, children, divorce, his near death and recovery from drug addiction... and punctuated with back stage moments, insight from the street, and Ron's nephew author Joel Thomas Hynes, taking the role of 'chorus of the people'.
0.0Betty Van Sevenant, a young resistance fighter from Bruges, arrested in March 1942, was declared "Nacht und Nebel". She recounts her deportation to the Ravensbrück and Mauthausen camps until liberation. Tobias Schiff, a Polish Jew from Antwerp, was deported with his parents to Upper Silesia on August 28, 1942, on convoy No. 25. His story begins upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau and concludes with the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen camp. (2 x 26 min.)
0.0Legendary Canadian documentarian Alanis Obomsawin digs into the tangled history of Treaty 9 — the infamous 1905 agreement wherein First Nations communities relinquished sovereignty over their traditional territories — to reveal the deceptions and distortions which the document has been subjected to by successive governments seeking to deprive Canada’s First Peoples of their lands.
5.7In this film, Paul Tomkowicz, Polish-born Canadian, talks about his job and his life in Canada. He compares his new life in the city of Winnipeg to the life he knew in Poland, marvelling at the freedom Canadians enjoy. In winter the rail-switches on streetcar tracks in Winnipeg froze and jammed with freezing mud and snow. Keeping them clean, whatever the weather, was the job of the switchman.
6.8The geographical dead center of North America and the beloved birthplace of Guy Maddin, Winnipeg, is the frosty and mysterious star of Maddin’s film. Fact, fantasy and memory are woven seamlessly together in this work, conjuring a city as delightful as it is fearsome.
7.5The gruesome story of the Jewish ghettos during the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe in the dark days of World War II, based on the records written by their inhabitants, who bear witness to the human tragedy of the Shoah; but also to an indomitable will to live.