Our People Will Be Healed, Alanis Obomsawin’s 50th film, reveals how a Cree community in Manitoba has been enriched through the power of education. The Helen Betty Osborne Ininiw Education Resource Centre in Norway House, north of Winnipeg, receives a level of funding that few other Indigenous institutions enjoy. Its teachers help their students to develop their abilities and their sense of pride. In addition to teaching academic subjects, the school reconnects students with their ancestral culture.
The fifth film in a cycle that began with The People of the Kattawapiskak River, Our People Will Be Healed adopts an optimistic tone without denying a dark past. It bears witness to the tragedies that have befallen the Plains Cree, such as being confined to reserves, forbidden to practise any cultural ceremonies, including the Sun Dance, and sent off to residential schools. But first and foremost, the film conveys a message of hope: that in an appropriate school environment, one that incorporates their people’s history, language and culture, Indigenous youth can realize their dreams.
The new interactive website Thank You for Playing invites users to discover the dark side of gambling by exploring how games of chance affect players who develop addictive behaviours.
Slot machines and other casino games are designed to manipulate players and their desire to play, eliciting a neurological reward/punishment reaction. When players win, their faith in a good outcome is strengthened; when they lose, they feel like they’ve been punished and try to redeem themselves. Without being aware of it, the player becomes a hostage to these two emotional states—and casinos know full well how to take advantage of this.
Thank You for Playing allows us to follow the personal stories of three players who recount their experiences of addiction and abstinence. Various experts (neurologists, psychologists, and addiction specialists) offer theories to help audiences understand the mechanism and source of the dangerous, drug-free addiction that is compulsive gambling.
Madeleine the Human Cannonball and her husband are carnies. Their lives, like their show, seem to be perfectly under control. But in reality, Madeleine is unhappy and wants to break out of her routine. Without saying a word, she leaves her husband and becomes the Bearded Lady. Time passes, but their love for each other does not die.
In her latest animated short, Oscar®-winning director Torill Kove tells a story of the beauty and complexity of parental love.
Threads takes us on a journey that is at once intimate in its telling and expansive in its scope. The film speaks volumes about the attachments we crave, form and sometimes grieve, as they evolve in ways that can leave us feeling lonely or left behind—as any parent of an adopted or biological child knows only too well.
The animated short follows a mother and daughter as they make their way through the young girl’s rites of passage: school, friends and late nights out. What happens to the thread that ties them together? How do they stay connected?
In a film without words, body language becomes the lexicon, and Kove has created a vocabulary that captures in a few simple strokes the dance of rejection and acceptance at the heart of human connection.
A film about the power of the bonds we form, and the ways in which they stretch and shape us.
Skin for Skin is a dark allegory of greed and spiritual reckoning set during the early days of the fur trade.
In 1823, the Governor of the largest fur-trading company in the world travels across his Dominion, extracting ever-greater riches from the winter bounty of animal furs. In his brutal world of profit and loss, animals are slaughtered to the brink of extinction until the balance of power shifts, and the forces of nature exact their own terrible price.
With nods to Melville and Coleridge, directors Carol Beecher & Kevin Kurytnik have created a visually stunning contemporary myth about the cost of arrogance and greed.
“Deyzangeroo” is a ritual performed in the Iranian port city of Bushehr. Influenced by the city’s colonial rule by the British and Portuguese, and the African slaves that followed, it is imbued with the terror and magic of the lunar eclipse. The ritual is believed to ward off evil spirits and take back the moon. It works every time. Directed by Iranian-Canadian filmmaker Ehsan Gharib and produced by the National Film Board of Canada’s Maral Mohammadian, this animated short was made with the haunting music of composer and virtuoso percussionist Habib Meftah Bushehri. It features hand-painted animation, time-lapse photography and trick photography using mirrors.
A gym teacher aspires to make sports accessible to two sisters who have muscular dystrophy. In a surprising twist, students without disabilities soon ask for wheelchairs to play basketball with them. What emerges is a movement of reverse inclusion that expands to an entire community, where the majority adapts to the minority.