Assimilation Memories

The only thing colder than a Canadian winter is Canadian bureaucracy (probably). Based on five real life stories, Romy Boutin St-Pierre and Joe Nadeau pay homage to the nation-wide stress headache of phone calls with the government in this surprising short.

Vive la crise !

The history of surfing is like one long ride in which surfers relay the baton to each other across the years on a single, endless wave. In order to understand how this ancestral Polynesian tradition was able to span the globe and the eras until it became a competitive sport and eventually won a place at the Olympics, we’ll plunge into its history through the exceptional stories of those who allowed it to survive and be reinvented.

While Trevor and Sam are smoking pot, Trevor’s mom comes home. When she finds out, Trevor reveals his father’s adulterous ways and destroys his family.

SONG 5: A childbirth song (the Songs are a cycle of silent color 8mm films by the American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage produced from 1964 to 1969).

A French documentary or, one might say more accurately, a mockumentary, by director William Karel which originally aired on Arte in 2002 with the title Opération Lune. The basic premise for the film is the theory that the television footage from the Apollo 11 Moon landing was faked and actually recorded in a studio by the CIA with help from director Stanley Kubrick.

Archival film maestro Göran Hugo Olsson has assembled—from a vast catalogue of footage in the vaults of Sweden’s national television service SVT—accounts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as witnessed and represented by Swedish journalists. Stories of the beginning of the Israeli state interwoven with the Palestinian struggle for independence. News coverage with Yasser Arafat and interviews with Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban during a visit to Sweden unseen since first broadcast. From the tenth anniversary of Israel’s founding to the First Intifada, perspectives and encounters with statesmen, civilians, revolutionaries, and intellectuals tell the story from myriad angles of an evolving media landscape, revivifying a history of the ongoing conflict.

Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Errol Morris confronts one of the darkest chapters in recent American history: family separations. Based on NBC News Political and National Correspondent Jacob Soboroff’s book, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, Morris merges bombshell interviews with government officials and artful narrative vignettes tracing one migrant family’s plight. Together they show that the cruelty at the heart of this policy was its very purpose. Against this backdrop, audiences can begin to absorb the U.S. government’s role in developing and implementing policies that have kept over 1300 children without confirmed reunifications years later, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

The director Andrés Kaiser combines hundreds of amateur films and photographs from the treasure trove of images belonging to his migrant grandparents creating a cinematic firework of analogies.

Festival panafricain d'Alger is a documentary by William Klein of the music and dance festival held 40 years ago in the streets and in venues all across Algiers. Klein follows the preparations, the rehearsals, the concerts… He blends images of interviews made to writers and advocates of the freedom movements with stock images, thus allowing him to touch on such matters as colonialism, neocolonialism, colonial exploitation, the struggles and battles of the revolutionary movements for Independence.

The voices of five gay men who cruised for sex at the World Trade Center in the 1980s and 1990s haunt the sanitized, commerce-driven landscape that is the newly rebuilt Freedom Tower campus.

An exploration of Cologne Cathedral, an emblematic monument and world heritage site. The towering place of worship took over 600 years to complete. Once the tallest building in the world, its ornate facade remains a masterpiece of Gothic architecture - and a reflection of the evolution of Franco-German relations.

A story of the LGBT struggle from the 1960s to the present, after the Stonewall riot sparked the militant action in New York that was to spread around the world. From San Francisco to Paris via Amsterdam, between the first Gay Pride, the election of Harvey Milk, the French "decriminalization", the AIDS epidemic and the first homosexual marriages, these few decades of struggle are embodied through numerous testimonies of actors and actresses of this revolution rainbow.

Evan, a filmmaker from Mississippi, catches feelings for a gal he meets at a found footage film festival in San Francisco. They decide to make a movie together, exploring the haunted landscapes of Evan’s family history in the swamplands of Florida. Old wounds are reopened and generational trauma reveals itself to be perhaps the scariest part of this attempted mockumentary that ends up being a little too real.

The documentary follows the life of Farroukh, a young Tajik immigrant who lives in Moscow outskirts with his family and does odd jobs in dreams of becoming an actor.

The collective life of the generation born as Jurij Gagarin became the first man in space. Vitaly Mansky has woven together a fictional biography – taken from over 5.000 hours of film material, and 20.000 still pictures made for home use. A moving document of the fictional, but nonetheless true life of the generation who grew up in this time of huge change and upheaval.

2017 Oscar Nominated Short Films: Documentary

One man's journey into the world of the so-called 'Bloodline' conspiracy, at the heart of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, where a secret society, the Priory of Sion, claims to have guarded evidence of the marriage of Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ, their children and their descendants down through the centuries.

A documentary about aliens and UFOs with re-enactments of alien interviews and video of a supposedly real video of an alien being interviewed by government officials.

A look at the Brazilian black movement between 1977 and 1988, going by the relationship between Brazil and Africa.