Positions (2018)

Portraits from a Fire

An Indigenous teenage boy fights through distorting realities as a family secret unravels.

Miro

When Miro returns home at the end of World War II he finds his land taken, his people gone, his daughter stolen and his service record treated with contempt. But the battlefield has taught him how to fight and he sets out to reunite his family waging his own form of justice.

Bootlegger

Mani, a master’s student, returns to the reserve in northern Quebec where she grew up. Her painful past resurfaces. Resolved to reintegrate into the community, she gets involved in the debate around a referendum on allowing the free sale of alcohol on the reserve. Laura, a bootlegger, pockets the profits she makes there under the protection of the band council and her partner Raymond. The latter is still angry with Mani, whom he holds responsible for the death of his daughter in a fire. Opposing forces quickly divide the community into two sides who face each other to determine the best path to independence.

On Hold

Between the city and the countryside, the subtle and modern forms of slavery unfold. A girl waits for the pick-up truck that will transport her to the city. Once there, amidst a never-ending row of walls and fences, she peeks into the entrance to a school. Lined up and in uniform, those girls are not the ones Carmen will join.

Huahua

A couple of young indigenous people are going to be parents. This news arouses their concern about the identity with which they will educate and raise their son or daughter.

Tanna

In a traditional tribal society in the South Pacific, a young girl, Wawa, falls in love with her chief’s grandson, Dain. When an inter-tribal war escalates, Wawa is unknowingly betrothed as part of a peace deal. The young lovers run away, refusing her arranged fate. They must choose between their hearts and the future of the tribe, while the villagers must wrestle with preserving their traditional culture and adapting it to the increasing outside demands for individual freedom.

Mother River

In a remote Peruvian city, lives Honorata Vilca, an illiterate woman of Quechua descent who sells candies more than 20 years ago, with the rain will cry to the sky itself.

Embrace of the Serpent

The epic story of the first contact, encounter, approach, betrayal and, eventually, life-transcending friendship, between Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman, last survivor of his people, and two scientists that, over the course of 40 years, travel through the Amazon in search of a sacred plant that can heal them. Inspired by the journals of the first explorers of the Colombian Amazon, Theodor Koch-Grunberg and Richard Evans Schultes.

Love & Loathing & Lulu & Ayano

A timid young woman who lives with her domineering mother accepts an Adult Video scout's offer to "become somebody else" by performing in porn videos. As she rises in popularity, the boundaries between her two lives begin to disintegrate.

Here Ends the World We've Known

1645. Guadeloupe. Ibátali, a Kalinago native and wife of a French colonist, leads Olaudah, an escaped African captive, on a journey where he may lose his freedom and his life. She is ready to sacrifice him to save her own skin. But their wounds bring them together. Will this be enough to make them something other than what colonisation has decided they should be: a savage to be exterminated, an African to be enslaved?

Once Were Warriors

A drama about a Maori family living in Auckland, New Zealand. Lee Tamahori tells the story of Beth Heke’s strong will to keep her family together during times of unemployment and abuse from her violent and alcoholic husband.

Man's Job

Juha is 38 years old and has three small children and a depressed wife. He sees himself as strong and believes a man should provide for his family. But one day Juha is fired from his job. Ashamed, he weaves a web of lies to hide the fact from his family. With the help of his friend Olli, Juha begins prostituting himself to support his wife and children. With this he makes in two hours what it took him two days to earn before. The shame and deception mushroom, but the pay from the new profession seems to offset the downside.

Sakuran

Anna Tsuchiya blasts back in time playing an oiran, a top-notched geisha of the Edo period’s Yoshiwara District, navigating brothel politics while trying to cling to the man she loves.

Eternal Ashes

ETERNAL ASHES tells the story of a mother, Ana and her daughter, Elena. Although they are separated, in the space and time they remain united forever. The people and the millenarian culture of Yanomami are the framework of this story about the unbreakable bonds of filiations. After an accident in the furious flow of the mythical Orinoco River, in the fifties, Ana was considered dead. Elena as an adult and facing the negligible possibility that her mother is alive decides to leave to the Amazon to search her. ETERNAL ASHES is a story of filiations, poetry, wisdom and especially of humanity.

On the Doll

A lurid, dark look into the lives of sex workers, where victims of child abuse deal with the consequences later in life.

When Shadows Dance at Night

Following her brother's death, Georgia, a young college student, returns home to her reservation only to find she's become the prey of a shapeshifting, faceless figure.

North Wind

In an indigenous village a murder occurs, and young man is sentenced to death for it. However his father, the real culprit, takes the responsibility.

2 in the Bush: A Love Story

Emily has just been dumped by her girlfriend, kicked out of her apartment, and fired from her job. Her best friend hooks her up with a new gig: personal assistant to a dominatrix. But when Emily falls for her new boss -- and her new boss's boyfriend -- she must decide what risks are worth taking for love. 2 in the Bush is an unconventional romantic comedy about dungeons, a fish named Archimedes, and the many forms that love takes.

That Which Once Was

In 2032 an eight-year old boy, displaced by global warming, fends for himself as an environmental refugee in a hostile northern metropolis. Haunted by memories of flooding that left him homeless and orphaned, the boy forms an unexpected friendship with an Inuk ice carver who helps him confront his past.

Birds of Passage

During the marijuana bonanza, a violent decade that saw the origins of drug trafficking in Colombia, Rapayet and his indigenous family get involved in a war to control the business that ends up destroying their lives and their culture.

The Unknown Country

A grieving woman embarks on an unexpected road trip from the Midwest toward the Texas-Mexico border as she grapples with the pain of her recent loss and seeks to understand her place in the world.

El cuidador del bosque

Plot unavailable

Dance Me Outside

Explores the sensitive, and tense, relationship between life on an First Nations reservation and life in the outside world. When Native Canadian Silas Crow is forced to write a personal essay in order to get a much-desired job, he tells the story of the rape and murder of an Indian girl by a drunken thug. When the killer received a lenient two-year sentence for manslaughter, the First Nations community felt shock and anger—and tried desperately to deal with the after-effects of this lack of justice.