In 1999, 11-year-old Nisha Platzer lost her older brother, Josh, to suicide. Twenty years later, her search for a specialized medical treatment leads her to the door of someone who was once exceptionally close to Josh. And so it is that she finally has the chance to truly know her brother through his chosen family. Captured over five years in which synchronicities continually manifested, Platzer’s documentation of these encounters gently asserts that both grieving and healing are meant to be communal experiences.
Something astonishing is happening in the city of Vancouver. Largely unnoticed amidst vehicle traffic, industrial sites and construction, wild salmon are returning to their ancient spawning grounds. Once an important salmon bearing area, this watershed became severely degraded as the city grew… but the rewilding has begun to pay off.
A flatbed editing table is snapped on. A woman’s hands reach in and out of the frame, cutting and editing a reel of film. She splices, scrubs, rewinds and rolls the sound and images. Fragments of animated archival footage flash across the screen: women walking in chains, protesting with placards, speaking at podiums. We hear bursts of words and the percussive whir and click of the Steenbeck—until a “message” is finally revealed.
The Stranger is a man with no name, no memory and absolutely nothing left to lose. But when he finds himself hunted by both the FBI and the Russian mob, this amnesiac decides to fight back. Pursuit cannot stop him. Torture will not break him. And with every beating, bullet and betrayal, he’ll remember another piece of the horror that took away his career, his family and his identity.
