History
187 products
The King is Not My Cousin
Duration: 1h02
Subscription access
In 2017, author Elzéa Foule Aventurin engaged in a series of interviews with her granddaughter. Together, they retrace, not without mischief, a family history sailing from one end of the Black Atlantic to the other. A story of silence, pride and revolt.
The Last Herd
Subscription access
Isolated in the remote mountains of the Gaspésie National Park, a last herd of caribou resists defiantly against human encroachment. When the first European settlers arrived on the East Coast of North America in 1534, caribou numbered in the tens of thousands. Today scarcely 100 remain. They are the last survivors. This documentary tells of their plight and the precarious tipping point on which...
African Glory
Did the first African to reach the Americas arrive as a king and not a slave? West Africa in the 13th century saw the rise of a vast empire — the Manden Empire. One hundred and eighty years before Christopher Columbus, its emperor Abu Bakr II set off to cross the Atlantic with an armada of 2,000 ships. He never returned. Drawing on both fact and fiction, this film sets out to restore the Manden...
Idle Times
Beginning in the late 19th century, the history of baseball tells the story of the transformation of pastures and mindsets in North America. Slow and repetitive, the game makes ample room for daydreaming and boasting. Full-bodied and mannered, it evokes the vastness of a new continent while also recalling its British origins. Filmed at the Victoria Stadium in Quebec and developed with the colla...
Passiflora
Subscription access
Montreal, September 1984. Within a span of five days, Montreal’s Olympic Stadium hosts Pope John Paul II and Michael Jackson. A perfect opportunity to explore the impact of the media on the masses. With caustic irony, this film gives voice to people excluded by Church doctrine: the gay and lesbian community, and women who’ve had abortions or been abused. Beyond documentary, fiction or news repo...
The Waldheim Waltz
When Austrian diplomat and former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim announced he was running for president in 1986, the news was greeted with joy and seen as a safe bet by his fellow countrymen and women. That is, until his Nazi past was revealed – an awkward detail he’d conveniently forgotten to mention during all his years in public office. Despite some people’s stupefaction and protests, ul...
La suite canadienne
In 1958, Ludmilla Chiriaeff's ballet _Suite canadienne_ was broadcast during the concert hour on Radio-Canada. This piece, now considered foundational for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, features dancers dressed as peasants in the settings of a fantasized colonial rurality. The discovery of this archival document is the starting point for the creation project led by amateur dancer and saxophonist...
Lettre d'un cinéaste ou le retour d'un amateur de bibliothèques
Lettre d'un cinéaste ou le retour d'un amateur de bibliothèques
Duration: 16 minutesSubscription access
Filmmaker Raúl Ruiz returned to his hometown in Chile and brought back this film shot in Super 8. In search of a mysterious pink-covered book, Ruiz takes a stroll through the city of Santiago and its suburbs, visiting his birthplace and the homes of old friends. In the background, the 1973 Chilean coup d'état and Augusto Pinochet's regime.
Three Comrades of Montreal
Giovanni, Francesco, and Salvatore have passed the age of 80 and are proud to still consider themselves communist or socialist comrades. All three left their poor villages in southern Italy after the war to settle in Montreal, where they maintained close ties with Italian left-wing parties while also being active in Canadian progressive unions and parties. Through images, personal documents, an...
Crossroads - Three Jazz Pianists
Crossroads - Three Jazz Pianists
Duration: 56 minutesSubscription access
Shot in 1987 at the Montréal International Jazz Festival, this documentary film presents musical performances and conversations between three jazz pianists with remarkably different styles - Soviet Leonid Chizhik, Black Montrealer Oliver Jones, and French-Canadian Jean Beaudet. It introduces viewers to the diversity of interpretation within today's jazz world, explores the roots of modern jazz ...
One Day In the Life of Noah Piugattuk
One Day In the Life of Noah Piugattuk
Duration: 3h46Subscription access
Kapuivik, north Baffin Island, 1961. Noah Piugattuk’s nomadic Inuit band live and hunt by dogteam, just as his ancestors did when he was born in 1900. When the white man known as Boss arrives in camp, what appears as a chance meeting soon opens up the prospect of momentous change.
Dis-moi
Subscription access
Echoing her own mother's voice recounting her relationships with her mother and grandmother, filmmaker Chantal Akerman visits three elderly Jewish women and asks them to speak about their ancestors. Seated in their living rooms and filmed in static shots, these grandmothers share their memories, the life of Jewish communities before the war, the Holocaust, and the efforts to survive the horror....
Damascus Dreams
How does one remember a homeland they are so deeply connected to and disconnected from? When Canadian-born filmmaker Emilie Serri travels to Syria for the first time in ten years, she feels alienated. A year later, when her grandmother dies and the war begins, she tries to piece back together an image of this elusive country she desperately wants to call her own. Gathering evidence from the pas...
Caffè Italia, Montréal
Subscription access
Avoiding the trap of nostalgia, Paul Tana paints an endearing and nuanced portrait of Montreal's Italian community using archival documents, fiction, testimonies, and extracts from a theatrical creation. From the first waves of immigration at the beginning of the century to the concert of the young rocker Aldo Nova, the film highlights, sometimes with humour, the contradictions of Italians in t...
I Wish I Knew
Subscription access
Shanghai, a fast-changing metropolis, a port city where people come and go. Eighteen people recall their lives in Shanghai. Their personal experiences, like eighteen chapters of a novel, tell stories of Shanghai lives from the 1930s to 2010.
Mémoire battante
Subscription access
Three memories – that of the Innu, the Jesuit, and Lamothe – juxtapose without contradicting each other, define without harming each other, evaluate without diminishing each other. In this feature-length film, Arthur Lamothe captures the daily life of the Innu and the culture of an indigenous people gradually being decimated.
Towards the Sun
You are now in the main hall of the National Museum in Beirut. A guard reminds you that you are encouraged to touch the archeological objects. A voice in your headset suggests that you lick the stone. You are now facing a hole in the wall on the lower left corner of a mosaic. The voice in your headset indicates that it was made by a sniper. Out of curiosity, you dial 1-9-9-1 to listen to the re...
Aurora's Sunrise
Subscription access
At only 14 years old, Aurora lost everything during the horror of the Armenian genocide. Two years later, through luck and extraordinary courage, she escaped to New York, where her story became a media sensation. Starring as herself in _Auction of Souls_, an early Hollywood blockbuster, Aurora became the face of one of the largest charity campaigns in American history. With a blend of vivid ani...
Mynarski Death Plummet
A completely hand-made historical micro-epic about the final minutes in the life of Andrew Mynarski, Winnipeg’s doomed Second World War hero. _Mynarski Death Plummet_ is a psyche- delic photo-chemical war picture on the theme of self-sacrifice, immortality and jellyfish.
Putin's Witnesses
In 2000, Vitaly Mansky films from within the first year of Vladimir Putin's presidency. Nearly twenty years later, the now-exiled documentarian revisits his archives and offers a critical reinterpretation of this moment. It's a fascinating firsthand account of the emergence of a gifted, secretive, and cynical leader.
The King is Not My Cousin
Duration: 1h02
Subscription access
In 2017, author Elzéa Foule Aventurin engaged in a series of interviews with her granddaughter. Together, they retrace, not without mischief, a family history sailing from one end of the Black Atlantic to the other. A story of silence, pride and revolt.
The Last Herd
Subscription access
Isolated in the remote mountains of the Gaspésie National Park, a last herd of caribou resists defiantly against human encroachment. When the first European settlers arrived on the East Coast of North America in 1534, caribou numbered in the tens of thousands. Today scarcely 100 remain. They are the last survivors. This documentary tells of their plight and the precarious tipping point on which...
African Glory
Did the first African to reach the Americas arrive as a king and not a slave? West Africa in the 13th century saw the rise of a vast empire — the Manden Empire. One hundred and eighty years before Christopher Columbus, its emperor Abu Bakr II set off to cross the Atlantic with an armada of 2,000 ships. He never returned. Drawing on both fact and fiction, this film sets out to restore the Manden...
Idle Times
Beginning in the late 19th century, the history of baseball tells the story of the transformation of pastures and mindsets in North America. Slow and repetitive, the game makes ample room for daydreaming and boasting. Full-bodied and mannered, it evokes the vastness of a new continent while also recalling its British origins. Filmed at the Victoria Stadium in Quebec and developed with the colla...
Passiflora
Subscription access
Montreal, September 1984. Within a span of five days, Montreal’s Olympic Stadium hosts Pope John Paul II and Michael Jackson. A perfect opportunity to explore the impact of the media on the masses. With caustic irony, this film gives voice to people excluded by Church doctrine: the gay and lesbian community, and women who’ve had abortions or been abused. Beyond documentary, fiction or news repo...
The Waldheim Waltz
When Austrian diplomat and former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim announced he was running for president in 1986, the news was greeted with joy and seen as a safe bet by his fellow countrymen and women. That is, until his Nazi past was revealed – an awkward detail he’d conveniently forgotten to mention during all his years in public office. Despite some people’s stupefaction and protests, ul...
La suite canadienne
In 1958, Ludmilla Chiriaeff's ballet _Suite canadienne_ was broadcast during the concert hour on Radio-Canada. This piece, now considered foundational for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, features dancers dressed as peasants in the settings of a fantasized colonial rurality. The discovery of this archival document is the starting point for the creation project led by amateur dancer and saxophonist...
Lettre d'un cinéaste ou le retour d'un amateur de bibliothèques
Lettre d'un cinéaste ou le retour d'un amateur de bibliothèques
Duration: 16 minutesSubscription access
Filmmaker Raúl Ruiz returned to his hometown in Chile and brought back this film shot in Super 8. In search of a mysterious pink-covered book, Ruiz takes a stroll through the city of Santiago and its suburbs, visiting his birthplace and the homes of old friends. In the background, the 1973 Chilean coup d'état and Augusto Pinochet's regime.
Three Comrades of Montreal
Giovanni, Francesco, and Salvatore have passed the age of 80 and are proud to still consider themselves communist or socialist comrades. All three left their poor villages in southern Italy after the war to settle in Montreal, where they maintained close ties with Italian left-wing parties while also being active in Canadian progressive unions and parties. Through images, personal documents, an...
Crossroads - Three Jazz Pianists
Crossroads - Three Jazz Pianists
Duration: 56 minutesSubscription access
Shot in 1987 at the Montréal International Jazz Festival, this documentary film presents musical performances and conversations between three jazz pianists with remarkably different styles - Soviet Leonid Chizhik, Black Montrealer Oliver Jones, and French-Canadian Jean Beaudet. It introduces viewers to the diversity of interpretation within today's jazz world, explores the roots of modern jazz ...
One Day In the Life of Noah Piugattuk
One Day In the Life of Noah Piugattuk
Duration: 3h46Subscription access
Kapuivik, north Baffin Island, 1961. Noah Piugattuk’s nomadic Inuit band live and hunt by dogteam, just as his ancestors did when he was born in 1900. When the white man known as Boss arrives in camp, what appears as a chance meeting soon opens up the prospect of momentous change.
Dis-moi
Subscription access
Echoing her own mother's voice recounting her relationships with her mother and grandmother, filmmaker Chantal Akerman visits three elderly Jewish women and asks them to speak about their ancestors. Seated in their living rooms and filmed in static shots, these grandmothers share their memories, the life of Jewish communities before the war, the Holocaust, and the efforts to survive the horror....
Damascus Dreams
How does one remember a homeland they are so deeply connected to and disconnected from? When Canadian-born filmmaker Emilie Serri travels to Syria for the first time in ten years, she feels alienated. A year later, when her grandmother dies and the war begins, she tries to piece back together an image of this elusive country she desperately wants to call her own. Gathering evidence from the pas...
Caffè Italia, Montréal
Subscription access
Avoiding the trap of nostalgia, Paul Tana paints an endearing and nuanced portrait of Montreal's Italian community using archival documents, fiction, testimonies, and extracts from a theatrical creation. From the first waves of immigration at the beginning of the century to the concert of the young rocker Aldo Nova, the film highlights, sometimes with humour, the contradictions of Italians in t...
I Wish I Knew
Subscription access
Shanghai, a fast-changing metropolis, a port city where people come and go. Eighteen people recall their lives in Shanghai. Their personal experiences, like eighteen chapters of a novel, tell stories of Shanghai lives from the 1930s to 2010.
Mémoire battante
Subscription access
Three memories – that of the Innu, the Jesuit, and Lamothe – juxtapose without contradicting each other, define without harming each other, evaluate without diminishing each other. In this feature-length film, Arthur Lamothe captures the daily life of the Innu and the culture of an indigenous people gradually being decimated.
Towards the Sun
You are now in the main hall of the National Museum in Beirut. A guard reminds you that you are encouraged to touch the archeological objects. A voice in your headset suggests that you lick the stone. You are now facing a hole in the wall on the lower left corner of a mosaic. The voice in your headset indicates that it was made by a sniper. Out of curiosity, you dial 1-9-9-1 to listen to the re...
Aurora's Sunrise
Subscription access
At only 14 years old, Aurora lost everything during the horror of the Armenian genocide. Two years later, through luck and extraordinary courage, she escaped to New York, where her story became a media sensation. Starring as herself in _Auction of Souls_, an early Hollywood blockbuster, Aurora became the face of one of the largest charity campaigns in American history. With a blend of vivid ani...
Mynarski Death Plummet
A completely hand-made historical micro-epic about the final minutes in the life of Andrew Mynarski, Winnipeg’s doomed Second World War hero. _Mynarski Death Plummet_ is a psyche- delic photo-chemical war picture on the theme of self-sacrifice, immortality and jellyfish.
Putin's Witnesses
In 2000, Vitaly Mansky films from within the first year of Vladimir Putin's presidency. Nearly twenty years later, the now-exiled documentarian revisits his archives and offers a critical reinterpretation of this moment. It's a fascinating firsthand account of the emergence of a gifted, secretive, and cynical leader.
