In the midst of an Edmonton deep-freeze, Mariah heads out. Every day, before dawn, while everyone else is sound asleep, she gets ready for her daily deliveries. Mariah is a bike courier, one of a handful of winter cycling snow warriors on Edmonton’s busy downtown streets.
Navigating a beautiful yet dangerous landscape, she shares ice-covered roads with cars and trucks. As the weather changes and the chill intensifies, flesh freezes and the challenges multiply.
Racing through snow and weaving through traffic, Mariah proves her strength, dedication, and capacity for joy. Extreme temperatures, violent winds, slippery roads and snowstorms do not stop a snow warrior.
Returning home in the dark, she dreams of another day doing battle with the elements. She loves her job.
Directed by Frederick Kroetsch and Kurt Spenrath, Snow Warrior is a love letter to winter, revelling in the embrace of the ghostly white shroud that defines the character of the people of the North.
East of the Rockies is an interactive narrative AR experience told from the perspective of Yuki, a 17-year-old girl forced from her home and made to live in one of Canada’s Japanese internment camps.
The story follows Yuki as she and her family adjust to their new reality inside the Slocan internment camp. They experience good times as well as bad, as they work to make life inside the camp as normal as possible.
Interaction comes from tapping, swiping, inspecting and zooming in on key elements within each scene. Every interaction activates a piece of scripted narrative spoken by acclaimed writer Joy Kogawa’s own granddaughter, Anne. Spoken in the first person, each line illuminates a different aspect of life in the camp, as documented in Yuki’s journal.
Enter a surreal grade-school gymnasium, where you are invited to re-experience the rituals of childhood: ball games, school lessons, and choir recitals. In your journey, you encounter a young boy who compels you to recall the sensory uniqueness, immediacy, and strangeness of a child’s world. GYMNASIA will lead you back into the secret spaces of your memories.
This is the first collaboration between the National Film Board of Canada, Felix & Paul Studios and Clyde Henry Productions.
The project is currently in development. GYMNASIA is having its preview at the acclaimed Annecy International Animation Film Festival, followed by an enlightening and in-depth discussion on the process of creating stop-motion animation in virtual reality and the compatibility between the two mediu
Coming at a moment of profound political and social crisis, What Is Democracy? reflects on a word we too often take for granted.
Director Astra Taylor’s idiosyncratic, philosophical journey spans millennia and continents: from ancient Athens’ groundbreaking experiment in self-government to capitalism’s roots in medieval Italy; from modern-day Greece grappling with financial collapse and a mounting refugee crisis to the United States reckoning with its racist past and the growing gap between rich and poor.
Featuring a diverse cast—including celebrated theorists, trauma surgeons, activists, factory workers, asylum seekers, and former prime ministers—this urgent film connects the past and the present, the emotional and the intellectual, the personal and the political, in order to provoke and inspire. If we want to live in democracy, we must first ask what the word even means.