The Colours of Pride

Black Is the Color highlights key moments in the history of Black visual art, from Edmonds Lewis’s 1867 sculpture Forever Free, to the work of contemporary artists such as Whitfield Lovell, Kerry James Marshall, Ellen Gallagher, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Art historians and gallery owners place the works in context, setting them against the larger social contexts of Jim Crow, WWI, the civil rights movement and the racism of the Reagan era, while contemporary artists discuss individual works by their forerunners and their ongoing influence.

The ocean contains the history of all humanity. The sea holds all the voices of the earth and those that come from outer space. Water receives impetus from the stars and transmits it to living creatures. Water, the longest border in Chile, also holds the secret of two mysterious buttons which were found on its ocean floor. Chile, with its 2,670 miles of coastline and the largest archipelago in the world, presents a supernatural landscape. In it are volcanoes, mountains and glaciers. In it are the voices of the Patagonian Indigenous people, the first English sailors and also those of its political prisoners. Some say that water has memory. This film shows that it also has a voice.

In this revealing study of Norval Morrisseau, filmed as he works among the lakes and woodlands of his ancestors, we see a remarkable Indigenous artist who emerged from a life of obscurity in the North American bush to become one of Canada's most renowned painters. Morrisseau the man is much like his paintings: vital and passionate, torn between his Ojibway heritage and the influences of the white man's world.

An NFB crew filmed a group of three families, Cree hunters from Mistassini. Since times predating agriculture, this First Nations people have gone to the bush of the James Bay and Ungava Bay area to hunt. We see the building of the winter camp, the hunting and the rhythms of Cree family life.

A woman with indiginous roots in her 40s goes on a trip into her past: When she was four years old she had been taken away from her mother by the canadian authorities, like many others. This is her very sad story as an example for many others.

Maurício Dias & Walter Riedweg often say the streets are their studio. From the observation of them and of those who populate them there arise installations about encounters, identity and territoriality. The Brazilian-born Dias met the Swiss Riedweg in 1993. Together they learned that they could boost one another’s ideas. “This marriage became Mau Wal,” says Dias. In this documentary, they present their works and the many characters behind them: people who make day-to-day living in the big cities. Street vendors at a Northeast Brazilian fair in São Paulo, illegal immigrants in their quest for the European dream, street kids and their memories. In stories or in the role it plays, the human element is always a centerpiece to the duo’s work.

Marepe, an artist from Bahia, produces art with anything he comes across in the town he lives in, Santo Antônio de Jesus. Packs of cigarettes, coconut palms, walls, and memories taken from the streets, go into putting together a personal archeology for this young artist.

The secret world of plants gets us closer to these motionless and quiet creatures, so attractive and surprising as the rest of the living creatures. The documentary reveals the most unknown aspects of the vegetable kingdom. We learn about the secret of the eternal youth of a 3500 years old sequoia and be charmed by the 'rafflesia arnoldi' flowers, able to reach up to one meter of diameter.

Follows Haida artist Bill Reid, from British Columbia. A jeweller and wood carver, he works on a traditional Haida totem pole. We watch the gradual transformation of a bare cedar trunk into a richly carved pole to stand on the shores of the town of Skidegate, in the Queen Charlotte Islands of B.C.

Colebrook Blackwood Reconciliation Park is where the Colebrook Training Home once stood. It is now a permanent memorial for the Aboriginal children of the “Stolen Generation” and their families.

This film documents Kutlug Ataman's artistic production in a retrospective approach and elucidates his works with his own words and with commentaries by curators, art institution directors, art historians and critics who are familiar with his production through close collaboration, to witness the construction of an impressive artistic production spanning 15 years. The film also includes the excerpts from the artworks and the installation footages of their realization.

Rafael França: obra como testamento

An Aboriginal Australian and Native American documentary narrated by award-winning actor Jack Thompson, One Heart-One Spirit tells the story of Kenneth Little Hawk, an elder Micmac/Mohawk performing artist, meeting the oldest surviving culture on the planet: the 40,000 year old Yolngu nation located in northern Australia.

I am sitting in a room is a sound art piece by American composer and sound artist Alvin Lucier composed in 1969. The first performance of the work was in 1970 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In collaboration with his partner Mary Lucier. The piece features Lucier recording himself narrating a text, and then playing the tape recording back into the room while re-recording it. The new recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated. Due to the room's particular size and geometry, certain resonant frequencies are emphasized while others are attenuated. Eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the characteristic resonance of the room.

Amidst the Colombian Andes, a group of trans women from the Embera Chami community make their way into the international fashion scene, empowered through artistic collaboration and creation while preserving their spiritual heritage and ancestral connection to their territory.

Muffins for Granny is a remarkably layered, emotionally complex story of personal and cultural survival. McLaren tells the story of her own grandmother by combining precious home movie fragments with the stories of seven elders dramatically affected by their experiences in residential school. McLaren uses animation with a painterly visual approach to move the audience between the darkness of memory and the reality that these charismatic survivors live in today.

Legendary documentary filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin provides a glimpse of what action-driven decolonization looks like in Norway House, one of Manitoba's largest First Nation communities.

Follow filmmaker Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers as she creates an intimate portrait of her community and the impacts of the substance use and overdose epidemic. Witness the change brought by community members with substance-use disorder, first responders and medical professionals as they strive for harm reduction in the Kainai First Nation.

Amazônia, a Nova Minamata?

“Shellmound” is the story of how one location was transformed from a sacred center of pre-historic cultures to a commercial mecca for modern people. What began as a Native American burial ground three thousand years ago, was transformed first into an amusement park, and later an industrial age paint factory. Now, the tainted ancient soil sits beneath the glittering lights of Banana Republic, Victoria’s Secret, and the AMC movie theaters. “Shellmound” examines the decisions made during the recent toxic cleanup, excavation, and construction of the Bay Street mall through the eyes of the city of Emeryville, the developer, the archaeologists, and the native Californians who worked on the site.