Canada Vignettes: Bridging the Gap

Animator Mathieu Labaye's tribute to his father, who suffered from multiple sclerosis and was confined to a wheelchair.

During an ongoing devastating war, a disabled young orphan tries to put an end to his pain. All of a sudden, paranormal activity shakes the world he lives in.

Adapted from the video game series of the same name, NiNoKuni follows high school peers Yuu and Haru who must travel between two separate yet parallel worlds to help save their childhood friend, Kotona, whose life is in danger. In this magical quest complicated by love, the three teens will be tasked with making the ultimate choice.

The story revolves around high school boy Ayumu Tamari, who has an illness that makes him start to turn to stone when he's stressed. Since he couldn't fit in with his class, after repeating a year, he declared that he wanted to have a "Sparkly youth" as well. To do this, he changed his hair and clothes to be more fashionable, and constantly checked for popular topics to stay in the know. In the midst of Ayumu's life of making a facade, his homeroom teacher and stone-loving geology teacher Kouya Onihara says that Ayumu's stone transformation is beautiful. Ayumu begins to become attracted to Kouya, who starts to give him advice.

This is a story of a girl born with a bad leg. Ritsuko longs to go to school and make lots of friends, but this proves as not so easy. Her mother is very protective of her, and she is teased by her classmates, because of her disability. Will she manage to keep her smile?

A four armed chef goes about his day.

An animation about a disabled penguin who lives on a rocky island in the southern seas where she feels isolated from the rest of her colony. She is inventive, resourceful and tough but frustrated about what she cannot do.

Six months after the events of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha: The Movie 1st, Fate has returned to Uminari City with Lindy as her legal guardian and is living the life of a normal elementary schoolgirl along with Nanoha and her friends. The reunion between the two new-found friends is cut short, however, when they are assaulted by four ancient magic users who identify themselves as the Wolkenritter. As the motives behind the actions of the Wolkenritter become clear, Nanoha and Fate find themselves in a race against time to stop the reactivation of a highly dangerous artifact known as the Book of Darkness.

At a time where there were no alarm-clocks, an old men worked as an awaker. Every day he walked the long way from his house to the village until he gets an old shiny bell.

We all share the same kind of brain yet everybody has a different view of the world around us. As a very intriguing example, Carlotta vividly explains how a world without faces does look like. She suffers from the miswiring of a tiny brain region that makes it impossible for her to see and remember faces as a complete construct, called prosopagnosia or face blindness.

A paper cut-out stop-motion animation where the protagonist visits an exhibition of Matisse-inspired paper cuts in her pink wheelchair and is transported from the reality of the dull grey world outside into the colourful world of her imagination.

With dreams of diving abroad, Tsuneo gets a job assisting Josee, an artist whose imagination takes her far beyond her wheelchair. But when the tide turns against them, they push each other to places they never thought possible, and inspire a love fit for a storybook.

"Daisy's Final Goodbye" is an evocative animated tale based on a true story. It chronicles the heart-wrenching journey of Steven, a PTSD-afflicted veteran, as he grapples with the profound loss of his devoted service dog, Daisy. The weight of this farewell is almost unbearable. As a poignant homage, filmmaker Steven Long crafts this narrative five years after Daisy's departure, celebrating not just her unwavering bond, but also honoring the countless canines who've embraced us as kin.

This flipbook-style animation demonstrates the emotions of people who hear voices

Lo specchio di Lorenzo

On the verge of losing the last thread of sight he has left, Adam tries to process his loss.

Lee is a young man determined to win the heart of Claire, a young woman determined to make life difficult for him. Dancing playfully on her crutches, Claire frustrates Lee’s romantic advances, transporting him away to daunting environments where he’ll need to think on his feet if he’s to win her affections. Director Simon McKeown worked with actor Lee Soar and choreographer Claire Cunningham to create this colourful motion-capture animation which was first broadcast on BBC Big Screens across Britain in 2010. Mckeown explores themes of power, control and rejection in the work and originally created two versions with different endings for festival audiences to choose from – ‘win’ or ‘lose’?

Romantic war film in which the daughter of a German baron falls in love with the crippled Hans who has been declared unfit for the army, to the jealousy of his brother.

Traces the lives of the Hartings, a blind Montreal family of three who make their living singing in the city's subway stations. The Hartings lost their only sighted child Hassan in a tragic drowning accident, and have since turned to the teachings of Russian mystic Grigori Grabovoi, hoping to resurrect their son. Resurrecting Hassan is an exploration of this family's legacy of grief, tragedy and abuse; the film will follow them on their path to redemption.

Sam Schmidt lived out his boyhood dream as an IndyCar racer, winning races and earning the title of IndyCar "Rookie of the Year" along the way. That dream came to an abrupt end when Sam crashed into a wall at 200 miles per hour, leaving him a quadriplegic. Reengineering SAM pulls the curtain back and shows up close the serious implications of a life of paralysis on Sam and everyone around him. Sam's accident rendered him physically helpless, never being able to brush his teeth, much less drive again, until a dedicated group of some of the brightest minds today stepped up to build him a car that he could drive, using only his head. Through groundbreaking adaptive technologies, Reengineering SAM chronicles Sam Schmidt's inspirational road back to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and shows the promise of freedom and mobility for almost anyone confined to a wheelchair.