The Business End: Violence in Cinema

'Ink and Gold: An Artist's Journey to Olympic Glory' is a short form documentary that follows the journey of New Zealand artist and athlete, Zakea Page, winning the Lausanne 2020 Youth Olympic Games medal design competition and fulfilling a lifelong dream to perform at the opening ceremonies. The film was shot over the course of one week in Lausanne, Switzerland, at the 2020 Youth Olympic Games and weaved together with self-taped footage of Zakea's younger years as an athlete and artist. Accompanied with interviews of his family, 'Ink and Gold' highlights the connection between art and sport in bringing together peoples of diverse cultures and backgrounds to bridge barriers of language and foster connections, mutual understanding, and respect for one another.

From the slow waitings for opening of the big top to the loneliness in the dressing room backstage, Abuhadba follows the life of a small circus in Chile run entirely by a traditional circus family.

César Menéndez confesses that he has lived and, at the same time, is a man condemned to paint. Through a brief tour we enter the interior of his work and his world, loaded with a great religious and sacrilegious metaphor, in the tradition of Luis Buñuel or Federico Fellini.

An experimental short where the filmmaker considers her personal relationship with intimacy, sexuality and the male gaze.

With depth, intimacy, and humor, FLOAT! captures filmmaker Azza Cohen's magnetic grandma’s life-affirming journey learning to swim at 82, inspiring audiences to defy societal expectations of aging and to boldly look forward at every stage.

Aria Dean explores the black creative labour put into memes, images defined not by their content but by how they are circulated, mutated and compressed. While all memes lack attribution, Dean illustrates a palpable link between white appropriation of memes created by black people and a deeper lineage of theft and leering fascination.

This short documentary shows the reactions of European immigrants as they land in Halifax at the beginning of the 1960s. From the port, we follow them on a snowy journey by train to Montreal.

Mother and son turned killers. Mama's Boy is a true crime Australian documentary investigating what drove Samantha Brownlow to convince her son Corey Lovell to murder her stepfather.

People from different ethnic backgrounds with "difficult" names by Western standards share their experience with moving through the world with an identity that challenges others to simply just say their name. A short social docu-film by Mariam Meliksetyan, “Say My Name” is a meditation on identity, otherness, assimilation, community, and ancestral roots.

A first-person account of a kid named Sidney in a town that helped him become who he is today: Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia.

Got You

A quickfire portrait of the New York City ballroom scene in the ‘80s.

A satire on celebrity with a cacophony of gossip merchants, publicists, and “a host of stars.”

Short documentary about the lives of three girls and the women who rescued them from retrogressive cultural practices in their own Maasai community at the AIC Girls School and Rescue Center in Kajiado, Kenya. It is an intimate portrait of these women as they sacrifice everything to make a stand against female genital mutilation and early forced marriage happening within their own culture.

Joan Bakewell visits Haworth in Yorkshire, home of the Brontës, to see the setting in which the novelists worked.

Making of Jean Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965)

On the coast of the Arctic Ocean of Chukotka live people cut off from the world. Their life revolves around hunting walruses and whales and protecting villages from bears coming from the tundra. This turns the film into a reflection on death. Marine animals become the food of people, animal leftovers are used to feed arctic foxes on a fur farm, human cemeteries become prey for bears. It seems that all the inhabitants of these places are involved in the cycle of food and death. The film departs from the usual rhythmic structure of cinema, being built on the principle of a shamanic ritual, a meaning-forming event for northern peoples.

Documentary film about Martin Park, a homeless man living in Dublin, and his friendship with photographer and filmmaker Donal Moloney.

A short documentary chronicling the personal lives and narratives of Thai "ladyboys," who are born men but present themselves as women, living openly in Thai society. The film interviews ladyboys from all walks of life-- performers, filmmakers, activists-- to learn what it's like to live in a society with visible gender fluidity, and to explore if Thailand is really as open to and accepting of sexual diversity as it seems.

Shows new methods in treating those afflicted with mental health issues. Contrasts past treatment regimes where people were locked away out of sight with the new, 1960s, psychiatric ideas of "group therapy" and talking therapy. Also shows practical behaviours aimed at returning patients to productive lives in society and outpatient services.