Band of Exile (1994)

Black Ice

This incisive, urgent documentary examines the history of anti-Black racism in hockey, from the segregated leagues of the 19th century to today’s NHL, where Black athletes continue to struggle against bigotry.

Escape from the World's Most Dangerous Place

Successful model Samira Hashi makes an emotional return to Somalia, one of the most dangerous places in the world and the place she was born. Civil war broke out in 1991, 10 days after Samira's birth, but two years later her family managed to flee the country and she grew up in the UK.Now, as Samira and the war both turn 21, she's going back for the first time to visit the people and places she left behind. The contrast with her safe and glamorous life in London could not be starker as she experiences firsthand the war's effect on a generation of young people growing up in conflict.

Someone Like Me

After 11 strangers unite to help a gay youth escape life-threatening violence in Uganda, the unexpected pandemic and conflicting opinions over his best interests test the limits of their commitment and jeopardize his fresh start in Canada.

American Teen

A documentary on seniors at a high school in a small Indiana town and their various cliques.

Top Rider

An in-depth look into the isolated sport of Motocross in the much more isolated island of Bermuda.

Kids On Ice

Quiet towns across rural Australia are in the grip of an Ice epidemic. Major international drug cartels are working with local outlawed motorcycle gangs to push crystal meth to a captive market of children.

The In Between

Following the death of her brother, filmmaker Robie Flores returns to her hometown Eagle Pass on the Texas/Mexico border, wanting to turn back time. She collides with unruly experiences of adolescence – quinceañeras, Rio Grande river excursions, teen makeovers and beyond – that invite her to soak up the details of the home her brother adored and she ignored. What emerges is a playful dance between a personal and collective coming-of-age portrait of kids on the border and Robie herself as she rediscovers the possibilities of joy in the aftermath of grief.

This Is Drag

An intimate, behind-the-scenes look at performance, glamor, fame, family, love and sacrifice as some of the world's most renowned drag queens come together for World Pride in Toronto.

Santa Camp

Every summer, a horde of professional Santas, Mrs. Clauses, and elves descend on a campsite in the New Hampshire woods to learn the tricks of their trade. But this year is different. The organizers, members of the one-hundred strong New England Santa Society, have decided to tackle a complicated and historic problem – the lack of diversity in the Santa industry. They enlist a Black Santa, a Santa with a disability, and a transgender Santa, each with their own surprising Santa origin story.

No Loitering

An intimate portrait of teenagers trying to understand their world and their possibilities. The film weaves together video shot by teens and by the filmmaker, as they work together to make a film and create expressive outlets for youth in the community. They organize dances and community events and paint a mural. At the same time, with humor and pathos, these young people raise issues around violence, feeling misunderstood by adults and lacking respect in their community. Set in the small town of Sitka, Alaska, home to a large Alaska Native population, the video chronicles their creativity, concerns and dreams.

Warrendale

This ground-breaking cinéma-vérité classic documents five weeks in the lives of twelve residents of a home for emotionally disturbed children. It is the first in the form that King later described as actuality drama. All the action is spontaneous and undirected, with neither interviews nor narration. The theme is the outrage of life. The children asked the filmmakers, Why is it that whenever pictures of us are put in the papers, our faces are blacked out. What is so awful about us that we cant be seen? They wanted to be filmed so that they could be seen.

Across This Land with Stompin' Tom Connors

Stompin' Tom performs live at the Horseshoe Tavern on Queen St. in Toronto.

Odyssey

Six California kids test their brains and talents against students in Odyssey of the Mind, a problem-solving competition requiring mechanical, creative and intellectual skills. With little money and zero adult participation, the teens build a robot to tell a story about bullying, exclusion and mental health. But how does their solution measure up?

love, amma

After being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, a young mother writes a letter to her daughter about their family’s collective journey to acceptance.

HALEMEH

In the Gaza refugee camp of Jerash, Palestinians face the critical issue of lacking identification documents. This situation undermines their rights and hinders access to essential services and opportunities.

Queerkamp

It takes courage to be a queer teenager at an LGBTQIA+ youth summer camp. Along with 65 other queer youngsters, Faas, Fano, Jeroen, and Finley are on their first summer camp, spending five intensive days of workshops that teach them how they can love themselves more. For the first time in their lives, the youths are surrounded by peers, all struggling with the same problems and feelings. As different as they are, they all share one thing: the need for contact and understanding. Mutual recognition of each other’s childhood or coming-out stories stirs up more emotions than they may have thought. Will this help them get closer to each other and eventually themselves?

Stories We Tell

Canadian actress and filmmaker Sarah Polley investigates certain secrets related to her mother, interviewing a group of family members and friends whose reliability varies depending of their implication in the events, which are remembered in different ways; so a trail of questions remains to be answered, because memory is always changing and the discovery of truth often depends on who is telling the tale.

Race/America

Race/America follows Robb Holland, one of the few Black professional race car drivers in the United States, as he fights for the GT America Championship behind the wheel of a Ford Mustang. After decades of breaking barriers in a sport known for its lack of diversity, Robb builds his own team—Rotek Racing—bringing together a dynamic, multicultural crew that reflects the change he wants to see in motorsports. This high-octane documentary takes you beyond the track and into the heart of a season-long battle, offering unprecedented access to one of the most diverse teams in the paddock. Race/America is a story of speed, grit, and the drive to make history.

Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives

Ten women in Canada talk about being lesbian in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s: discovering the pulp fiction of the day about women in love, their own first affairs, the pain of breaking up, frequenting gay bars, facing police raids, men's responses, and the etiquette of butch and femme roles. Interspersed among the interviews and archival footage are four dramatized chapters from a pulp novel, "Forbidden Love".

Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make Believe

Kindness, creativity, inclusivity, and a touch of magic makes the world a brighter place. Explore the story and impact of Canadian entertainer Ernie Coombs and his iconic series, Mr. Dressup, which enriched the lives of five generations.

Inuuvunga: I Am Inuk, I Am Alive

In this feature-length documentary, 8 Inuit teens with cameras offer a vibrant and contemporary view of life in Canada's North. They also use their newly acquired film skills to confront a broad range of issues, from the widening communication gap between youth and their elders to the loss of their peers to suicide. In Inuktitut with English subtitles.

kid 90

As a teenager in the '90s, Soleil Moon Frye carried a video camera everywhere she went. She documented hundreds of hours of footage and then locked it away for over 20 years.

Stranger at the Gate

A U.S. Marine plots a terrorist attack on a small-town American mosque, but his plan takes an unexpected turn when he comes face to face with the people he sets out to kill.

Limits of Europe

A prominent Czech journalist Saša Uhlová leaves her family and joins “cheap labour force” in Western Europe. Undercover, she works at an asparagus farm in Germany, tries her hand as a maid at a hotel in Ireland and takes care of the elderly in France. She experiences first-hand the struggles of Eastern European low-wage workers whose sacrifice and hard work allow for the Western society’s comfort. What is the real price that Europe pays for exploiting its own citizens? How do the lives of economic migrants, who have been forced to leave their children and elderly parents, look like? And why are privileged Europeans looking the other way?

The Blind Sea

Australian blind surfer Matt Formston’s mettle is pushed to the limits in this thrilling documentary. With only 3% vision, the 4x World Champion attempts his most fearsome and dangerous challenge yet, surfing the monster waves of Nazaré.

Homefront

A family with five children flees the war raging in their home village on the Russian border. They end up in Mshanets, a farming village on the other side of the country, remote and unknown. Here the family starts building a new home. At the same time, two documentary makers come to the village, looking for a story. In the Lymar family they find the ideal characters for their film. But one day, when the renovation of their house is almost finished, the family disappears. The filmmakers go in search of their characters and along the way they try to find an answer to the question: what does a person need to feel at home?

One Day on Earth

Recording a 24-hour period throughout every country in the world, we explore a greater diversity of perspectives than ever seen before on screen. We follow characters and events that evolve throughout the day, interspersed with expansive global montages that explore the progression of life from birth, to death, to birth again. In the end, despite unprecedented challenges and tragedies throughout the world, we are reminded that every day we are alive there is hope and a choice to see a better future together. Founded in 2008, it set out to explore our planet's identity and challenges in an attempt to answer the question: Who are we?

La Meilleure Façon de tracer

Plot unavailable

Golden Land

When Finnish-Somalian Mustafe discovers his ancestors’ land in the horn of Africa is full of copper and gold, he decides to swap his family’s safe but boring life in the Nordics for Somaliland, a self-declared state in East Africa. As Mustafe struggles to lift the treasures from underground, his children embark on a bumpy journey to uncover where they really belong.

T'Day

Plot unavailable

The Most Secret Place on Earth

After 30 years of conspiracy theories and myth making, this film uncovers the story of the CIA's most extensive clandestine operation in the history of modern warfare: The Secret War in Laos, which was conducted alongside the Vietnam War from 1964 -1973. While the world's attention was caught by the conflict in Vietnam, the CIA built the busiest military airport in the world in neighboring and neutral Laos and recruited humanitarian aid personnel, Special Forces agents and civilian pilots to undertake what would become the most effective operation of counterinsurgency warfare. As the conflict in Vietnam grew, the objective in Laos changed from a cost effective low-key involvement to save the country from becoming communist into an all-out air war to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail and bomb Laos back into the Stone Age that it had never really left in the first place. Conventional bombs equivalent to the destructive power of 20 Hiroshima-type weapons fell on Laos each year - 2 million tons

The Hippie Temptation

CBS TV news special hosted by Harry Reasoner explores the way-out world of the Hippies and the Haight-Ashbury psychedelic 1960s LSD scene. Footage of LSDs users experiencing bummer trips. The Diggers, the Oracle and cool street and Golden Gate Park scenes with hippies tripping out. The Grateful Dead are interviewed and are shown performing "Dancin' in the Streets" on a flatbed truck in Golden Gate Park. The Hippie Temptation!

The Hearing

After crossing 11 countries irregularly to seek asylum in Canada, Peggy, Simon and their three children are waiting for the hearing that will determine whether they get refugee status or not. Having fled political repression in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the family tries to rebuild a peaceful life in Montreal, in spite of the constant threat of deportation. Between ghosts from the past, hopes for the future, a complex legal maze and seemingly endless trial, the film delves into the struggle of the Nkunga Mbala family to remain in Canada. Offering unprecedented access to their hearing before the Immigration and Refugee Board, the film unveils the opaque process of claiming asylum in Canada.

34 Days in 2018

13-year-old Anderson Cefola documents his month-long grounding in 2018 with an old handheld camera he kept.

Generation C

Due to the measures taken by the government, students have fewer and fewer prospects for a meaningful future. Life is on pause and society is kept in fear. The confidence in a bright future is gone. Even after 18 months, there is still no light at the end of the tunnel. The many promises have not yet changed this situation. In this moving documentary, young people give an idea of the impact of the measures on their lives. Is there still hope or has the damage already been done?

Rosans, Bitter Honey

In 1963, Rosans, a village in the Hautes-Alpes region depopulated by the rural exodus, welcomed Harkis (military soldiers) forced to leave Algeria for supporting France during the Algerian War. Around thirty families settled in a camp below Rosans. Nearly half a century after their arrival, first- and second-generation Harkis and native Rosanais recount their experiences of this culture clash, often painful, sometimes happy. Language barriers, religious differences, living in barracks for 14 years, and unemployment were all obstacles to overcome in order to be accepted and then achieve mutual enrichment. Enriched with archive footage to explain the historical context of the time, the film seeks above all to express feelings and unspoken words.

Crash 'n' Burn

Crash 'n' Burn is an experimental film shot in and named after Toronto, Ontario's first punk rock club. (Not to be confused with Peter Vronsky's similarly titled 1977 documentary on the Toronto punk scene made for the CBC television network.) The film, shot on 16mm black-and-white stock, features performances by Dead Boys, Teenage Head, The Boyfriends, and The Diodes".

Taxi!

This feature documentary studies one of the city’s most visible yet most anonymous character: the taxi driver. Filmed by day and night, the film offers an entertaining and sometimes comical look at the drivers, fleet operators and dispatchers who are expected to deliver passengers, parcels… and even babies.

Carnaval

Once a year, people from different marginalized communities meet together in the woods to delve into the art of circus and have this discipline become a common way to express themselves, away from the city.

FEELING EVERY SUNSET

During summer of 2023, a group of friends spent their free time filming a surfing video in Punta Hermosa, Perú. This is the end product.

BFF

A blurry kind of intimacy between friends, self, lens, and everyone else watching.

Lahore - Refugees from India

Millions of Muslims flee to Lahore in the newly created state of Pakistan, prompted by the partition of British India.