In this short documentary, five black women talk about their lives in rural and urban Canada between the 1920s and 1950s. What emerges is a unique history of Canada’s black people and the legacy of their community elders. Produced by the NFB’s iconic Studio D.
RACHEL CARSON is an intimate portrait of the woman whose groundbreaking books revolutionized our relationship to the natural world. When Silent Spring was published in September 1962 it became an instant bestseller and would go on to spark dramatic changes in the way the government regulated pesticides.
An Austrian teenager marries the Dauphin of France and becomes that country's queen following the death of King Louis XV in 1774. Years later, after a life of luxury and privilege, Marie Antoinette loses her head during the French Revolution.
The Battle of The Alamo
A personal interpretation of Norwegian history - starring a grandmother who during the Second World War loses her job ironing the King's shirts. Instead she gains access to the enemy's uniforms, and inspires her own brand of resistance fighters, the "Shirt Guerillas".
A college student (Rinna) typing a manuscript for a novelist (Estes) begins to realize he's planning to carry out the murder mystery in real life.
A famous mommy blogger faces an empty nest as her daughter prepares to go away to college. When she turns to her blog for advice, she finds herself on the attack by a reader who has conflicting opinions. While she deals with him online, offline she finally meets a great single dad and sparks start to fly. What she doesn’t know is that the confrontational reader and the adorable single dad are, in fact, the same person.
Zidane, un destin d'exception
Annette, 38, answers an ad from Paul, a farmer. She has only met him twice when she and her son Eric move in with him in the dead of winter. There Annette has to face Paul's hostile sister and her own past, which soon catches up with her.
During the height of the social revolution, a young dancer searches for salvation when she chooses to leave paradise.
This documentary interweaves celluloid and voice recordings by Maya Deren, and colleagues who knew her firsthand: Jean Rouch, Jonas Mekas, Alexander Hammid, Cecile Starr etc. Maya Deren (1917-1961) was an experimental filmmaker. In the 1940s and 1950s she made several influential avant-garde films, such as Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). Images from this and her other work are used in this documentary. You can also hear her voice, as well as accounts by contemporaries such as Jean Rouch and Jonas Mekas.
Chantal Akerman meets with elderly Jewish women in Paris, all of them survivors of the Shoah, and listens to their family stories. Between interviews, Akerman's mother Natalia speaks of her own family. Made for a French miniseries on grandmothers.
Through one woman's experience as an adopted person and also as a mother who relinquished her child in 1971, this documentary highlights the many complex issues associated with adoption.
Eugenie has a unique gift: she hears and sees the dead. When her family discovers her secret, at the end of the 19th century, she is taken by her father and brother to the neurological clinic at La Pitié Salpêtrière with no possibility of escaping her fate. Her destiny becomes entwined with that of Geneviève, a nurse at the hospital.
Haunted by his violent past, the ambitious lawyer Anuol returns to his homeland, South Sudan, committed to serve his country and hold accountable those who are responsible. But his quest, led by the rules of law, hits a wall when he is confronted with his countrymen’s reluctance to reconcile with history.
Feindschaft
A wife and mother, diagnosed with breast cancer, decides to truly live her life, which has become comfortable and predictable, and the family must adjust.
Kate is on a plane taking Warren, her 18 year old Torres Strait Islander foster son, to meet Flo, his birth mother, who is gravely ill in hospital in Brisbane. Flo hasn't seen Warren since she took him to the hospital on Thursday Island when he was a toddler and the white authorities took him away. But as Warren, Flo and Kate all prepare themselves for the reunion, unbeknown to them, Kate's Brisbane based parents, Keith and Dellmay, are planning a different kind of reunion.
Never before has the extraordinary life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo been framed in relation to the full spectrum of the historical and cultural influences that shaped her. THE LIFE AND TIMES OF FRIDA KAHLO explores the 20th century icon who became an international sensation in the worlds of modern art and radical politics.
Recently-widowed Leann and her 17-year-old daughter Julina move into an isolated polygamous compound, where the freethinking Julina meets like-minded Ryder, son of the religious compound’s charismatic Prophet, Ervil.