
29 Mar 2024

Sardou, autoportrait
No overview found

This documentary short introduces us to the Caravan Stage Company, the world's only horse-drawn open-air theater. Every summer it tours British Columbia and Alberta, bringing live entertainment to communities where television is often the main diversion. In a montage of short sketches, the film shows the troupe on the road and in performance. Hard work and laughter are basic ingredients of this unconventional lifestyle.

29 Mar 2024

No overview found

17 Mar 2010

Cruelty, psychological and sexual violence, humiliations: reality television seems to have gone mad. His debut in the early 2000s inaugurated a new era in the history of the audio-visual. Fifty years of archives trace the evolution of entertainment: how the staging of intimacy during the 80s opened new territories, how the privatization of the biggest channels has changed the relationship with the spectator. With the contribution of specialists, including philosopher Bernard Stiegler, this documentary demonstrates how emotion has made way for the exacerbation of the most destructive impulses.

10 Nov 1993

A retrospective of the work of the late actor Warren Oates, with clips from his films and interviews with cast and crew members who worked with him.

01 Jan 1973

On the Kainai (Blood) First Nations Reserve, near Cardston, Alberta, a hopeful new development in Indigenous enterprise. Once rulers of the western plains, the Bloods live on a 1 300-square-kilometer reserve. Many have lacked gainful employment and now pin their hopes on a pre-fab factory they have built. Will the production line and work and wages fit into their cultural pattern of life? The film shows how it is working and what the owners themselves say about their venture.

17 Sep 2021

The meaty saga of Burger Baron, a rogue fast-food chain with mysterious origins and a cult following, run by a loose network of fiercely independent Arab Canadian immigrants.

01 Jan 1951

This 1950s' film looks at the measures to preserve water flow from the Rocky Mountains. With the steady falling of the water table, the exploitation of timber stands and the recession of glaciers, water conservation was an urgent concern of the Alberta and federal governments.

01 Jan 1958

This short dramatic film illustrates a cooperative program of fire protection that was carried out across Alberta in the late 1950s. It presents the problems inherent in a voluntary fire brigade, as well as the everyday heroes who step up and get the job done. The film is an entertaining look at how a crew that was once considered to be the joke of the town can evolve into the best fire brigade in the West.

01 May 1961

This short documentary offers a portrait of life on a cattle ranch, for both its human and animal inhabitants. Featuring sprightly music by folk singer Pete Seeger and narration by theatre actress Frances Hyland, the film is shot through the seasons on a large Canadian cattle ranch near Kamloops, British Columbia. With hundreds of cows and calves on the ranch, there’s no shortage of work to be done: soil cultivation and crop maintenance are taken care of by seasonal ranch hands while the resident cowboys—“anxious guardians”—brand and breed their bovine charges.

15 Oct 2014

The wolf of British Columbia is on a quest to master water, fishing and swimming. According to several specialists, the wolf is at the first stage of a process that could turn it into a marine mammal. How will its evolution unfold?

03 May 2023

The heir to a Burger Baron franchise, the filmmaker chases clues through rural Alberta, capturing the trials and tribulations of Arab immigrants while uncovering the saga of a rogue fast-food chain with mysterious origins and a cult following.

01 May 2020

In this era of “reconciliation”, Indigenous land is still being taken at gunpoint. Unist’ot’en Camp, Gidimt’en checkpoint and the larger Wet’suwet’en Nation are standing up to the Canadian government and corporations who continue colonial violence against Indigenous people. The Unist’ot’en Camp has been a beacon of resistance for nearly 10 years. It is a healing space for Indigenous people and settlers alike, and an active example of decolonization. The violence, environmental destruction, and disregard for human rights following TC Energy (formerly TransCanada) / Coastal GasLink’s interim injunction has been devastating to bear, but this fight is far from over.

01 Jan 2007

In this follow-up to his 2003 film, Totem: the Return of the G'psgolox Pole, filmmaker Gil Cardinal documents the events of the final journey of the G'psgolox Pole as it returns home to Kitamaat and the Haisla people, from where it went missing in 1929.

09 Aug 2023

Peer behind the curtain as a cast of neurodivergent teens prepare to come of age and hit the stage in their school’s time-travelling, John Farnham–themed musical.

18 Aug 2017

Tobin, a transgender teen living in Squamish, BC, prepares for his acting debut where he’ll be playing a male leading character in the youth play. While rehearsals are in progress, his friends and chosen family band together to help remove him from a difficult living situation and connect him the support he needs.

07 Feb 2021

Marc-André Leclerc, an exceptional climber, has made solo his religion and ice his homeland. When filmmaker Peter Mortimer begins his film, he places his camera at the base of a British Columbia cliff and waits patiently for the star climber to come down to answer his questions. Marc André, a little uncomfortable, prefers to return to the depths of the forest where he lives in a tent with his girlfriend Brette Harrington. In the heart of winter, Peter films vertiginous solos on fragile ice. He tries to make appointments with the climber who is never there and does not seem really concerned by this camera pointed at him "For me, it would not be a solo if there was someone else" . Marc-André is thus, the "pure light" of the mountaineers of his time, which marvel Barry Blanchard, Alex Honnold or Reinhold Messner, interviewed in the film. An event film for an extraordinary character.

01 Jan 2003

This documentary tells the story of a Chinese cemetery in BC that became a National Heritage site. For Chinese pioneers who died in Canada, Victoria's Chinese Cemetery at Harling Point was a temporary resting place until their bones could be returned home. (Traditional Chinese belief says that the soul of a person who dies in a foreign place wanders lost until their bones are returned home.) This film traces the rich history of the Vancouver Island cemetery from controversy and neglect to its revival as a historic site. Told by those closest to it, the story of Harling Point is a metaphor for Canada, a country still working on making a home for all who live within its borders.

05 Sep 2005

Documentary following the actors playing the role of Billy in Billy Elliot the Musical as they prepare for their West End debut.

01 Jan 2002

Over Beautiful British Columbia is a spectacular scenic tour of Canada's Pacific province. Savor the grandeur of British Columbia as you join a helicopter adventure from elegant Victoria to rugged Fort Nelson, from the ski slopes of Whistler to the sun-drenched Okanagan shores, from the razor spine of Mount Robson to the primeval coast of the Queen Charlotte Islands.

03 Oct 2024

On a misty morning in the fall of 1985, a small group of Haida people blockaded a muddy dirt road on Lyell Island, demanding the government work with Indigenous people to find a way to protect the land and the future. In a riveting new feature documentary drawn from more than a hundred hours of archival footage and audio, award-winning director Christopher Auchter (Now Is the Time) recreates the critical moment when the Haida Nation’s resolute act of vision and conscience changed the world.

26 Mar 2010

Over the course of a year, film follows Vancouver Pride Society president Ken Coolen to various international Pride events, including Poland, Hungary, Russia, Sri Lanka and others where there is great opposition to pride parades. In North America, Pride is complicated by commercialization and a sense that the festivals are turning away from their political roots toward tourism, party promotion and entertainment. Christie documents the ways larger, more mainstream Pride events have supported the global Pride movement and how human rights components are being added to more established events. In the New York sequence, leaders organize an alternative Pride parade, the Drag March, set up to protest the corporatization of New York Pride. A parade in São Paulo, the world's largest Pride festival, itself includes a completely empty float, meant to symbolize all those lost to HIV and to anti-gay violence.