Catherine Van Der Donckt

Caiti Lord had always dreamt of being a singer. A born-and-bred New Yorker, she studied at the best music schools and performed on Broadway. Her future was sparkling bright . . . But today, the only thing that glitters is the snow that falls on the desert. Self-exiled in Madrid, New Mexico, far from the glitz and glamour of the Big Apple, Caiti’s looking for a way forward. In this former ghost town, surrounded by mountains and old hippies, between her day job slinging drinks to tourists and the sleepless festive nights, her life is slipping by. That’s the story she tells each day on her radio show. As the United States sinks into madness and the world turns terrifyingly absurd, Caiti feels increasingly suffocated. She’s about to turn 30 and her future has never felt so uncertain. How can she find her way back to a place of meaning and self-expression?

If something of import has taken place in our lifetimes, chances are that Steve McCurry has photographed it, from the wars in the Arab world to the 9/11 attacks. Denis Delestrac’s documentary on the photographer charts McCurry’s journey through a restless life spent on constant move, chronicling our times and living with the intense loneliness and trauma that came along with his work. Today, surrounded by a loving family, McCurry is finally home but never not in the pursuit of color.

Today, 11 years after the massive earthquake in Haiti that left over a million people homeless and killed hundreds of thousands, the country has still not recovered from the disaster. Despite billions of dollars in aid money, Haiti struggles with some of the highest levels of poverty and unemployment in the Western hemisphere. In Port-au-Prince, various citizens are shuttled through a city in crisis. Maneuvering around barricades, garbage dumps and the packed streets of the capital, they speak candidly about the current state of their country. Through the car window a frustrated population passes and occasionally interacts with the passengers in the vehicle. Beautifully shot, with a lively score, Zo Reken presents a complicated portrait that testifies to the magnitude of the tragedy and highlights the disorganized state of international aid.

Today, 11 years after the massive earthquake in Haiti that left over a million people homeless and killed hundreds of thousands, the country has still not recovered from the disaster. Despite billions of dollars in aid money, Haiti struggles with some of the highest levels of poverty and unemployment in the Western hemisphere. In Port-au-Prince, various citizens are shuttled through a city in crisis. Maneuvering around barricades, garbage dumps and the packed streets of the capital, they speak candidly about the current state of their country. Through the car window a frustrated population passes and occasionally interacts with the passengers in the vehicle. Beautifully shot, with a lively score, Zo Reken presents a complicated portrait that testifies to the magnitude of the tragedy and highlights the disorganized state of international aid.

Follows four women of the estimated 40,000 displaced people moved from the banks of the Xingu River in the Amazon Basin to make space for construction of one of the world's largest dams, the Belo Monte.

A Delicate Balance explores the life and dreams of young dancers at the dawn of adolescence. A tender and captivating documentary in which the students of the Quebec Superior Ballet School tell each other with candid lucidity.

Revealing women, showing men Dermatology professor Marie-Claire is embarking on a new project linking skin cells and sexuality, when unexpected events disrupt her professional, family and intimate life.

From Norman McLaren to the Grands Ballets Canadiens, to Igor Stravinsky and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Vincent Warren has made history. Inhabited by the importance of culture in a society, he worked all his life as a 'bearer of beauty'. A MAN OF DANCE is the story of this living legend and its memorable era.

The origins and evolution of the Innu Nikamu Music and Aboriginal Arts Festival are intimately linked to the territorial roots of the Innu people and to the life of the Maliotenam Reserve community. For centuries past the Innu had followed a seasonal migration cycle, wintering in the northern territories for the caribou hunt and returning every summer to the north shore of the St-Lawrence. Festivities, meetings, traditional games and weddings marked the latter period, and the Festival has become the modern day reincarnation of the ancient summer celebration.

Pascal Marchand arrived in the mythical land of Burgundy to harvest the grapes at age 21. Now 30 years later, he is a renowned wine artist and innovator. Shot over the catastrophic 2016 season, the film is both a love letter and a cautionary tale.

Quebec, on the cusp of the 1960s. The province is on the brink of momentous change. Deftly selecting clips from nearly 200 films from the National Film Board of Canada archives, director Luc Bourdon reinterprets the historical record, offering us a new and distinctive perspective on the Quiet Revolution.

Inuit artist Asinnajaq plunges us into a sublime imaginary universe—14 minutes of luminescent, archive-inspired cinema that recast the present, past and future of her people in a radiant new light. Diving into the NFB’s vast archive, she parses the complicated cinematic representation of the Inuit, harvesting fleeting truths and fortuitous accidents from a range of sources—newsreels, propaganda, ethnographic docs, and work by Indigenous filmmakers. Embedding historic footage into original animation, she conjures up a vision of hope and beautiful possibility.

Inuit artist Asinnajaq plunges us into a sublime imaginary universe—14 minutes of luminescent, archive-inspired cinema that recast the present, past and future of her people in a radiant new light. Diving into the NFB’s vast archive, she parses the complicated cinematic representation of the Inuit, harvesting fleeting truths and fortuitous accidents from a range of sources—newsreels, propaganda, ethnographic docs, and work by Indigenous filmmakers. Embedding historic footage into original animation, she conjures up a vision of hope and beautiful possibility.

In the suburbs of Montreal, Mutang is a family man. But in Malaysia, he was a voice of resistance for the indigenous peoples of Sarawak. The documentary A TIME TO SWIM follows Mutang as he returns home for the first time since his exile in 1992. The remote forest village, however, is not like he remembers it. Contrary to the will of the elders, cousins who once stood by him at the blockades are now welcoming the timber companies. Despite the threat of a lingering arrest warrant, Mutang can’t resist taking up his old cause. A TIME TO SWIM explores the effects of environmental destruction on the fabric of a community through the personal story of Mutang’s search for belonging in a place where the very ideas of home and heritage are slipping away.

Set in the coldest waters surrounding Newfoundland’s rugged Fogo Island, this short film follows a group of “people of the fish”—traditional fishers who catch cod live by hand, one at a time, by hook and line. Filmmaker Justin Simms takes viewers deep inside the world of these brave fishermen. Travel with them from the early morning hours, spend time on the ocean, and witness the intricacies of a 500-year-old tradition that’s making a comeback.

In Pursuit of Peace follows four Canadians on the front lines of international peace initiatives - in South Sudan, Turkey, Congo and Iraq. We experience the challenges of their work, exploring how their peace building strategies are put to the test in this new 21st century paradigm of conflict resolution.

Posted on the FBI Ten Most Wanted List in 1977 for his involvement in bombings perpetrated by the United Freedom Front, he was arrested in 1984. From his prison cell in 1992, the political prisoner Raymond Luc Levasseur writes 'My Blood is Quebecois' in which he explains his rebellion and his radicalization by his status as a 'frog' and the racism he witnessed in a small mill town of Maine where his ancestors came to work in the factories. Released in 2004, he returned to his native Maine where he tells us about his career, from his childhood in a French Canadian family until today.

Since the early 1990s, when a bloody civil war broke out in Algeria between the government and Islamist militants, the concept of haram—the forbidden—has demanded the rigid separation of men and women. Café Désirs is a fascinating look at a generation of young, single Algerian men as they come of age in the ancient city of Constantine, trapped between strict religious virtue and sexual desire. Three eloquent guides take us into the male-only world of cafés and hookah lounges, to talk openly about their lives, their frustrations with work and the social dangers of living in a sexually repressed society. It's a world especially fraught for those pursuing same-sex relationships, which are illegal and severely punished. Café Désirs is an engaging and complex exploration of male sexuality and gender politics in a country still struggling with the aftermath of civil war and colonialism.

Documentary exploring the thought and work of Aimé Césaire.

Satellite dish salesman Gus (Stephen Ouimette) experiences some life-altering changes when he meets performance artist Lucy (Christie MacFadyen) in this visually poetic fantasy. After Lucy vanishes, leaving a puzzling note, Gus goes on a quest for the mysterious woman. Moving from his meticulous life in a technologically advanced world into the spontaneity of nature, Gus learns some important lessons and begins to trust his own instincts.

Featuring a salesman and a consumer, this animated short is a humorous study of the patterns that define buyer-seller relationships. The Persistent Peddler is based on Claude Cloutier's hit comic strip La Légende des Jean-Guy, first introduced in Quebec humour magazine Croc.

At a critical moment in the history of the written word, as humanity’s archives migrate to the cloud, one filmmaker goes on a journey around the globe to better understand how she can preserve her own Romanian and Armenian heritage, as well as our collective memory. Blending the intellectual with the poetic, she embarks on a personal quest with universal resonance, navigating the continuum between paper and digital—and reminding us that human knowledge is above all an affair of the soul and the spirit.

In the heart of the Boreal forest lives a family renowned as much for their gourmet forest pickings as for their life of self-sufficiency.