Richard Lavoie

Carole Laganière dives deeply into personal territory in this beautifully crafted exploration of absence and loss and its painful effect on daily lives. Inspired by her mother’s steadily advancing Alzheimer’s and the inevitability of her estrangement, Laganière weaves their story with the stories of others wrestling with loss: Ines, an immigrant who returns to her birth country of Croatia to find the mother who abandoned her during the war; Deni, an American author who’s finally able to search for his Quebec roots; and Nathalie, who’s desperately looking for her missing sister. Through their experiences the film ponders how absence is often the catalyst for a quest—a quest for information, understanding and often acceptance. Through its many voices, Absences speaks to us of the immense fragility and resiliency of human emotions.

In this documentary shot at Canadian Forces Base Petawawa during a troop deployment to Afghanistan, children and teens talk about the particular circumstances of having soldiers as parents. Directed by Claire Corriveau, Children of Soldiers lifts the veil on a reality shared by thousands of young Canadians, and on the difficulty of finding a balance between loyalty to the troops and staying true to themselves.

"Barbers - A Men's Story" takes us into barbershops, a haven where men can talk freely among themselves. The film features barbers who describe their love and passion for their work. These endearing and dedicated men, who have been their customers' trusted confidants for decades, are approaching the twilight of their careers in a trade that is slowly dying out.

A documentary about the act of filmmaking.

In a quest to rediscover the spiritual values of his own people, an African filmmaker from the Gourmantche tribe of Burkina Faso visits an Aboriginal band, the Atikamekw of northern Quebec. The resulting documentary is a dialogue between those who divine the future in the sand with those who use snow-encased sweat lodges to reconnect with the spiritual world.

A blend of drama and documentary, this film follows several people caught up in the turmoil of the modern world. The drama centres on a woman who has burned out and who holds up her own despair – and her attempts to rebuild her life – as a mirror to the rest of us. With a blend of gravity and humour, Sylvie Groulx's film shows the absurdity of a society dedicated to the cult of speed at all costs.

Mark Rowswell may well be one of the most popular comedians Canada has ever produced. A virtual unknown in his own country, Rowswell has an enormous following in mainland China, where he is known as Dashan. His appearances on Chinese television have drawn up to six hundred million viewers. Together wih his Chinese partner and mentor, Ding Guangquan, Rowswell practices a comedic art form known as crosstalk, whose roots stretch back centuries.