Today it is the city of Montreal, but 3 centuries ago the tiny band of missionary founders called it Ville-Marie, the holy city of Mary. This film goes back to its beginning and those who felt called to plant an oasis of Christianity in the North American wilderness. In an imaginative, at times almost surrealistic, way the film recalls the highborn company from France, and shows what survives of Ville-Marie in the Montreal of today.
Ladies of good families and social standing come to have their afternoon tea with their daughters who will someday follow in the same tradition. A charming portrait of a time that is slowly disappearing.
A web documentary that explores Montreal’s incredible contribution to jazz music history through the legendary black musicians of Little Burgundy – the neighbourhood that was a hub of musical creativity, private clubs and speakeasies from the Jazz Age 1920s to the Golden Era of Jazz in the 1940s and 50s. Oscar Peterson, Oliver Jones, Norman Marshall Villeneuve, the Sealey Brothers, Nelson Symonds, and Louis Metcalf are among the greats who lived or played in "Burgundy".
Haitian history is presented through an explosion of colour, dance and music, as the country prepares for its legendary carnival.
Set mainly in present day Dallas, Texas and Port-au-Prince, Haiti, this film features three main characters at three different stages of the same process. Supported by a nonprofit, these extremely tall teenagers come to the United States from Haiti using basketball as means to get an education and help their own country change.
Hosted by Keeley Hawes, star of the popular television series The Durrells, this documentary reveals the adventures of the eccentric Durrell family once they left Corfu, Greece.
We follow Roach, a 17-year-old ex-junkie and squeegee punk living on the streets of Toronto and Montreal. As part of the filmmaking process, he's been given a camera to document his world. The footage he gets is urgent, because there's a war against squeegee kids. This documentary is from the point of view of the kids themselves, in order to provide alternative voices. Roach's camera is positioned behind "enemy" lines: living in derelict buildings, squeegeeing for money, being hunted by police.
Gilles Groulx's first film shot in 1955 with a camera borrowed from his brother and edited during his spare time when he worked as an editor at the Radio-Canada news service a few years before he joined the NFB. Silent film, presented as its author left it, where the soil and the dialectic of Groulx's work are already there: documentary realism, the social space to be explored, daily life, the relationship between individual and society, social disparities, the consumer society, seduction and happiness.
Samuel Beckett has fascinated Adrian Dunbar since he was a young student. Now, 30 years after Beckett's death in Paris, Dunbar explores what made the man who made Waiting for Godot.
This film chronicles the turbulent gang war and the spiraling violence happening on the ground in Haiti and attempts to cut through the hype surrounding Chérizier, the former police officer-turned-gang chieftain at the center of Haiti’s of it all. It offers a sobering look at the man behind the myths.
Le Fils
An immersive dive into the world of Heenok and his collective Gangster & Gentleman, while touching on broader questions about the survival of hip-hop and the state of humanity. Did Roi Heenok really earn his first million at 18? Is he a real fake gangster or a fake real MC? And ultimately, is Roi Heenok truly a king?
In the 1980s, a swine flu crossed the Haitian-Dominican border and started to affect the Creole pig, an important commodity in Haiti. The flu also threatened livestock in the United States. As a preemptive measure, the USAID in conjunction with the Haitian government proceeded to exterminate all Creole pigs from the island, leading to a crushing economic blow for an already impoverished country.
This short film is a series of vignettes of life in Saint-Henri, a Montreal working-class district, on the first day of school. From dawn to midnight, we take in the neighbourhood’s pulse: a mother fussing over children, a father's enforced idleness, teenage boys clowning, young lovers dallying - the unposed quality of daily life.
Lila
A look back at the troubled life of genius British writer Virginia Woolf (1882-1941).
From the flickering screens of Hollywood horror, to the haunted cane fields of colonial Haiti, Black Zombie unearths the buried origins of the zombie, reclaiming it as a symbol of survival and spiritual resistance.
Le dernier souffle, au cœur de l'Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal
Je suis finissant
BREAKING POINT brings viewers back to those tense, critical moments when Canada's future as a country was at stake.