Place of the Boss: Utshimassits

When Masset, a Haida village in Haida Gwaii (formerly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands), held a potlatch, it seemed as if the past grandeur of the people had returned. This is a colourful recreation of Indigenous life that faded more than two generations ago when the great totems were toppled by the missionaries and the costly potlatch was forbidden by law. The film shows how one village lived again the old glory, with singing, dancing, feasting, and the raising of a towering totem as a lasting reminder of what once was.

Through the figure of Lakota activist and community organizer Madonna Thunder Hawk, this inspiring film traces the untold story of countless Native American women struggling for their people's civil rights. Spanning several decades, Christina D. King and Elizabeth A. Castle's documentary charts Thunder Hawk's lifelong commitment, from her early involvement in the American Indian Movement (AIM), to her pivotal role in the founding of Women of All Red Nations, to her heartening presence at Standing Rock alongside thousands protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. She passed her dedication and hunger for change to her daughter Marcy, even if that often meant feeling like comrades-in-arms more than mother and child. Through rare archival material—including amazing footage of AIM's occupation of Wounded Knee—and an Indigenous style of circular storytelling, Warrior Women rekindles the memories and legacy of the Red Power movement's matriarchs.

This documentary short offers a nostalgic look at the steam locomotive as it passes from reality to history. In its heyday, the big smoke-belching steam engine seemed immortal. Now, powerful and efficient diesels are pushing the old coal-burning locomotives to the sidelines, and the lonely echo of their whistles may soon be a thing of the past.

The people of Unamenshipu (La Romaine), an Innu community in the Côte-Nord region of Quebec, are seen but not heard in this richly detailed documentary about the rituals surrounding an Innu caribou hunt. Released in 1960, it’s one of 13 titles in Au Pays de Neufve-France, a series of poetic documentary shorts about life along the St. Lawrence River. Off-camera narration, written by Pierre Perrault, frames the Innu participants through an ethnographic lens. Co-directed by René Bonnière and Perrault, a founding figure of Quebec’s direct cinema movement.

A basketball team born out of an egg, in a hockey-crazed city, playing in a baseball stadium, fights for survival and ultimately conquers a nation and the league. This documentary offers an in-depth look at how a fledgling franchise transformed into a cultural phenomenon, uniting communities and reshaping Canada's identity. The Raptors' story is the ultimate underdog tale, with an unprecedented look into the team's global impact and lasting influence across Canada and beyond.

Documenting the shared trajectory between Canada’s rise as a global basketball powerhouse and the circumstances that helped shape the country’s multicultural identity.

A true Canadian iconoclast, acclaimed transgender country/electro-pop artist Rae Spoon revisits the stretches of rural Alberta that once constituted “home” and confronts memories of growing up queer in an abusive, evangelical household.

With no Forest left to hunt and no land to cultivate, the Maby-Guarani depend on the sale of their handcraft to survive. Three young Guarani filmmakers accompany the daily life of two comunities united by the same history, since the first contact with the Europeans until the intense coexistence with today’s White people.

This travelogue of Canada's Jasper National Park starts with a visit to the totem pole in the town, then to Lac Beauvert and the park's lodge and bungalows, where more than 600 guests enjoy golf, swimming and scenery. Within the park are the Canadian Rockies' highest summit, largest glaciers, greatest ice fields, and deepest canyons. After a lesson about feeding bears, we tour the vast park: Pyramid Lake and Pyramid Mountain, Mount Edith Cavell and Angel Glacier, a horse trail overlooking the Athabasca River, Athabasca Falls, the Great Colombia Ice Field, Athabasca Glacier and the special cars that bring tourists, and finally Maligne Lake, a fisherman's paradise.

This Traveltalk series entry visits the easternmost area of the province of Nova Scotia, Canada. We learn that although the island was originally settled by the French, most of the island's inhabitants are of Scottish descent. We are also told that the main industries of the island are agriculture, fishing, and mining. After a look at Bras d'Or Lake, we visit the village of Baddeck. Near there is the grave of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. The last stop is the industrial city of Sydney, home of steel plants, foundries, and coal mines.

A harsh winter in Canada’s Muskoka, where players face sub-zero temperatures, contrasts with New Zealand, where hockey is just starting to take root. Yet, between these two far-apart nations, there’s one thing they share: a deep love for the game of hockey.

The Continuum Project follows some of the world's best climbing talent around the globe to document bold new routes and daring repeats on ice, rock, and in the alpine. The film focuses on these climbers' drive to explore, their passion for the mountains and the climbing lifestyles.

We begin at the train station near Montana's Glacier National Park, where Blackfeet Indians meet the arriving tourists. Glacier Park, an off-screen narrator tells us, has the remnants of 60 glaciers, from three ice ages. We visit the lodge, built in Swiss style, where college students dressed in Swiss garb do the serving at the restaurant. We watch Indian dancing and a ceremony. After views of lakes, mountains, and trails in the park, it's north to Canada's Waterton Lakes, a vacation spot for Canadian and U.S. families.

This Traveltalk series short takes the viewer to Quebec, the city that was called the "New France".

A jetliner spans the miles, sheering through clouds to open sky and scenic vistas of the provinces below. Glimpses of town and country, of people of many ethnic origins, of a resourceful and industrious nation - impressions it would take days and weeks to gather at first hand - are brought to you in this vivid 1800-kilometer panorama.

This film takes us into the harsh realm of BC's early coal mines, canneries, and lumber camps; where primitve conditions and speed-ups often cost lives. Then, the film moves through the unemployed' struggles of the '30s, post WWII equity campaigns, and into more recent public sector strikes over union rights.

Wandering Spirit School, organized by concerned parents, broke with tradition by introducing subjects that are of particular relevance to its pupils. Traditional Indigenous stories, traditions, languages and crafts balance the program of academic subjects required by the Ontario Ministry of Education. The experience of the children at Wandering Spirit is contrasted with the very different life experienced by their parents, educated in the old residential schools.

Polar Life’s novelty was its theatre, with the audience seated on a central rotating turntable in the middle of eleven fixed screens. Viewers have described the intricate juxtaposition of screen images and narration and the complex relationship created between moving spectators and multiple screens. Documentation images and scripts of the bilingual narration by Lise Payette and Patrick Watson show elaborate temporal and spatial representations of the Arctic and Antarctic regions: the Inuit in daily activities in the Canadian North; other northern peoples of Alaska, Lapland, and Siberia; and settlers from the South, scientists, explorers, and other inhabitants of the landscape, including reindeer, bears, and birds. Archival film footage of early northern explorers, combined with newly shot documentary footage, was edited across the various screens to create spatial relationships that are sometimes coherent, sometimes fragmented.

In present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina, economically depressed towns turn themselves into tourist destinations in order to survive—deliberately forming their own cultural narratives. Centering on four different locations, The Stone Speakers interrogates a nation’s contradictory memories. Made with subtlety and tactful distance, director Igor Drljaca’s film reveals the traumatic consequences of being a country that is stuck in a postwar identity crisis.

Is it possible that a group of people share our culture and fate, but are drifting in another part of the ocean? Taiwanese aboriginal musicians, Suming and Baobu, are invited to New Caledonia for a month of musical exchange. They lived with local Kanak musicians, playing music and sometimes composing together. In the end, they all found that the secret to innovation and globalization is to re-discover one’s own cultural roots.